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WHERE THE TWAIN MEET 

Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/wheretwainmeetOOgaun 







[Frontispiece. 



WHERE THE TWAIN 
MEET 

BY MARY GAUNT 

Author of '" Alone in West Africa" "A Woman hi China,'" 
"A Broken Journey ;" " The Uncounted Cost" etc. 












NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 

1922 



': •' '■:':- ' 



PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY 



OLIVER AND BOYD, EDINBURGH 






\> 



TO 

MY FRIEND 

MRS LANG 

/ gratefully dedicate this book: 

My Dear Elsie, 

I wonder if you remember as vividly as I do the very 
drastic criticism of a book of mine that first introduced us to 
each other. My publisher showed it to me with some hesitation 
because it was so scathing, but it went right to the point. Most 
of the book was scrapped there and then, and my literary education 
was begun under your care. It was you indeed who taught 
me that I needed educating in my art. That is twelve years 
ago, and I have never since let a book go into the world till it 
has received your approval. I am afraid I have sometimes tried 
you severely, but it has always been my ambition to be your 
prize pupil. I owe more than I can say to my sympathetic 
teacher. 

It is a small thing to offer my latest book to you, but I hope 
you will accept it with my love and warmest thanks. 

Affectionately yours, 

MARY GAUNT. 

Sainte Agnes, France. 
8th September 1921. 



PREFACE 

Spain first set foot in the Western World, and if the 
discovery brought great wealth it brought also much 
individual suffering and bitter hardship. In Jamaica, 
she found no people living in barbaric splendour, no 
stores of gold and silver and precious stones, only 
a lovely land, fruitful and fertile, valuable only to 
her because she did not dare let another nation 
settle so close to the rich possessions of which she 
was mistress. But the other nations of Europe 
were naturally anxious to share in the rich spoil of 
the West, and if Britain took Jamaica and held her, 
it was only I think because she could not take Cuba 
and Hispaniola. The Spaniards fought for every 
inch of the island before they lost it, and now for 
remembrance of them there remains but a few 
place names and legends of the treasure they left 
stored there. 

If colonisation was difficult for the Spaniards 
it was still more difficult for .the British, coming 
from the cold North. No one was eager to brave 
the dangers of the tropics, and like the king in 
the parable, desiring to fill his tables for the feast, 
Government sought in the highways and byways 
for a population, and they imported white bondsmen 
and women, virtually a slave population, the first 



viii PREFACE 

shadow that was to impede the progress of the land. 

Labour was branded. The men worked — and died — 

in the fields, and the women became the mistresses 

of the young planters, so that marriage went out 

of fashion, and the free women were neglected and 

forlorn. 

And when they ceased to send the white bonds- 
men, they sought a substitute in the black man from 
Africa. 

The man who comes out to a new land is apt 
always to see the land he leaves behind through a 
softening veil that enhances its desirability. He sees 
only its good points. And naturally this emphasises 
the drawbacks of the new land. He speaks disparag- 
ingly of it, he writes home disparagingly, dwelling 
on his many hardships. Jamaica was no exception 
to the almost universal rule. Most men went there 
to make their fortunes, with every intention of 
returning to spend them. Only Hans Sloane, a 
wise and far-seeing man, saw the glory of the land, 
and left behind him a record of its wealth and its 
beauty and fertility. Lady Nugent, writing more 
than one hundred years later, was much more swayed 
by public opinion, and saw what she was told she 
would see, a deadly climate where men died like 
flies, though even she does arrive at the poignant fact 
that the women who lived with less licence, bore 
this climate far better than their mates. 

From her pen, too, we first have some pity for 
the unfortunates the British imported from the 
Guinea Coast to work in their plantations. Terrible 
are the stories told of the sufferings of this alien 



PREFACE ix 

people from the moment they fell into the hands 
of the slavers till they stood in the slave markets 
at Kingston or Montego Bay, told calmly, told 
coldly, told simply as facts by men who saw only 
the difficulties of the trade, and of dealing with 
men and women who " wilfully " drowned themselves 
to escape their fate. On arrival, the stronger like 
cattle were sold in the open market, but only here 
and there do we get awful glimpses of the fate that 
befell the weaker. 

Life was no bed of roses for the planter and his 
white assistants, working to provide funds to be spent 
in the old country, but it was simply a hell at first for 
the savages they worked. 

On the plantations no white woman was welcome. 
As the masters had taken the white bondswoman 
for their temporary companions, so now they took 
the black while they were young and comely. At 
first it was savages and white masters, and the 
little coloured children who were but their fathers' 
chattels. 

So slowly the people progressed, we hardly 
realise there was any progress, till we see the men 
and women of dark complexion clothed and ardent 
church members, even though they are slaves, and 
we remember how short a while before they started 
here as naked savages. Two generations were 
worlds apart. Cruel rebellion there was, crueller 
retaliation, but still white and black advanced to 
better things in the land that was becoming the 
loved home. 

The years rolled on. First the trade was for- 



x PREFACE 

bidden, then the slave was freed, then the black 
man was given equal rights with the white, and 
now — Now there are still difficulties, difficulties 
born of ignorance, of poverty, but so there are in 
the upward march of every people under the sun. 
Sometimes they make great strides onwards, some- 
times they seem to pause and fall back, but really 
always the march is upwards, though we can only 
see the progress by looking back. 

An enchanting tale, a tale of rare adventure and 
romance is the past of Jamaica, and before her lies 
a glorious future, for the Empire is slowly awakening 
to the value of the tropical possessions that are 
within the borders, and this fruitful island of wood 
and mountain and water, set in a summer sea, must 
surely play a great part in the future development of 
one of the great nations of the earth. 



CONTENTS 



I. Britain's First Tropical Colony 
II. The White Bondsmen 

III. Jamaica's First Historian . 

IV. The Castles on the Guinea Coast 
V. The Middle Passage . 

VI. The Plantation 

VII. Slave Rebellions 

VIII. The Maroons . 

IX. The Footprints of the Years 
X. The Making of Christians . 
XL The Freeing of the Slave . 
XII. Jamaica as I saw It . 



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1 


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33 


• 


57 


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76 


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98 




122 




150 


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. 170 


, 


. 216 


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. 23S 


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. 259 




280 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



A Mountain Scene . 

On the Way to St Ann's Bay 

Christiansborg Castle (Gold Coast) 

Annamabu Fort 

Gateway, Annamabu Fort . 

Going to Market . 

A Great House 

Montego Bay and Town, Jamaica . 

Mango Walk, Kempshot 

Looking up at Kempshot 



Frontispiece 
Face page 6 

76 

84 
84 
98 
„ 150 
„ 243 
„ 288 
„ 288 



WHERE THE TWAIN MEET 

CHAPTER I 

Britain's first tropical colony 

When first I took passage to Jamaica it seemed as 
if purest chance were sending me there. But I begin 
to believe there is no such thing as chance, for when 
I remembered that Jamaica was an old slave colony 
I realised that this last coincidence was but the 
culmination of a curious series that have guided my 
steps through long years. 

No one in my youth that I ever heard of wanted 
to go to West Africa, and yet from the time I was 
twelve years old I had an intense desire to go there, 
without the faintest hope of its being gratified. 

As a young girl I Came home to England and 
stayed with friends in Liverpool, shipowners, whose 
people had been African traders for hundreds of 
years, and African traders one hundred and twenty 
years ago certainly meant slave traders, for the slave 
trade was a "very genteel trade." I pored over the 
models of the factories they had on the West Coast 
of Africa, and the pictures of their ships in the Oil 
Rivers, and voiced my great desire to go there, a 
desire that amused them very much, for they who 
could have gone any day would not have dreamt 
of taking the trouble. They had estates in Jamaica 
too, had had them for many years, and I found on 
a shelf an old slave account book from that island 



2 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

which meant so little to them that they jotted down 
on the blank pages the number of eggs their hens 
laid. How I wished I could see the place whither 
those slaves from Africa had gone, but Africa and 
Jamaica were far away in those days. 

I went back to Australia, married and settled 
down, and then being widowed came to England 
again to make my way in the literary world, and 
the first spare money I had, it was £225, 1 remember, 
I realised my childish dreams and took passage for 
the West Coast of Africa. I was so interested, 
found it so well worth while, that I went again to 
the land to which no man wanted to go, the land 
that was known as the " White Man's Grave." Why 
I should have taken so keen an interest in the land 
where the slave trade was born, why I should later 
have gone to a slave colony, I cannot imagine, but 
I did, and the result has been a curious light on 
past and present, a linking up of those old days 
with the future that lies ahead of Jamaica. 

Perhaps in a former life I too was a slave, or 
perhaps I was one of those careless folk who lived 
in one of the death-traps they called Castles on 
the Guinea Coast, and something in me made me 
wish to see them again, and having seen them, 
something certainly stronger than myself made me 
finish with Jamaica, the lovely island where Britain, 
though she does not seem to know it, is experimenting 
in negro rule. 

Yes, surely, some haunting memory of a past life 
has shaped my career. 

And this is how it came about. I was ill and 
had to go to a warm climate, and as the War 
had disturbed shipping I could get passage nowhere 
except to Jamaica. And safe on board the Camito, 
steaming down the Welsh Coast with the tang of the 



THE END OF THE STORV 3 

salt sea breeze in my nostrils, it flashed across me 
that here at last when I least expected it had come 
my great chance. Into my hands had been put 
the opportunity, if I could but use it, to complete a 
half-finished task. I was indeed going to find out 
the end of the story that had thrilled my childish 
years, for this island set in a tropical sea is in- 
dissolubly bound up with the Castles on the Guinea 
Coast. From the swamps at the mouths of the 
Niger and the Gambia, from the surf-beaten Gold 
and Ivory and Slave Coasts had come the lumbering 
little square ships that took to the New World 
the dark people of the Old, hundreds and thousands 
of them, and in Jamaica there had grown up under 
the British Crown a people apart. Call it coincidence 
if you like, but to me it will always seem that a 
Greater Power guided my unwilling feet into the 
ways that brought me in touch with the things I 
most wanted to know. 

And sailing west on that comfortable ship, where 
ice, beef-tea, fruit, cakes, or any other desired luxury 
came at a word to the steward, where a question 
to the captain or one of the officers discovered for 
me in exactly what part of the world we were, it 
was impossible not to think of the first man who 
had dared those seas. The Genoese navigator had 
come sailing west under the Spanish flag, and he 
had come slowly, slowly, where we steamed fast. 
They were only just beginning to believe the world 
was round in those days, and doubtless many of the 
sailors shipped for the voyage were ignorant men, 
not knowing whither they were bound. And their 
leader felt his way dubiously where we were quite 
certain of our going. On and on they went into 
the unknown. How unknown we can hardly con- 
ceive nowadays, any more than we can conceive 



4 BRITAIN'S FIEST TROPICAL COLONY 

of the dangers they faced. Think of it. There were 
fish which could swallow a ship, crew and all, there 
was the "Flying Dutchman," portent of death, there 
were mermaids and syrens to lure them to destruction, 
there were enchantments of all sorts, in addition to 
the ordinary perils of the sea, and then of course — 
supposing the world wasn't round ! Suppose they 
arrived at the place where the water gathered itself 
together and poured in one mighty waterfall right 
off the earth into space and nothingness ! I am sure 
as the days went on the crews must have discussed 
the matter, have talked among themselves of the 
terrible dangers they were facing, have gone every 
night and morning to pray before the Virgin and 
Child on the poop, and at last they came to declare 
how worse than foolish was Columbus not to turn 
back when day after day showed still only a blue 
waste of waters. 

And if they had gone over that tremendous 
waterfall I am sure there would have been those 
among the crew who would have declared at the 
supreme moment that they knew it would be so, 
they had always known it would be so. Had Pedro 
not met a pig on the way to the ship, had the black 
cat not died before they reached Madeira, and surely 
the Admiral should have turned back when the wind 
shifted so that he saw the new moon for the first time 
through the glass of the cabin port ! 

But at last — what a long last it must have seemed 
to those first voyagers who had dared to leave the 
coasts — they saw sea- weed and land birds, and at last, 
at last — not the terrible waterfall they had feared but 
land, land, land such as they had left behind them. 
What a moment it must have been for the great 
mariner ! We passed that land, that island. There 
must linger round it still, I think, some of the wild 



DREAMS FROM THE PAST 5 

delight that filled the hearts of the explorers, for still 
men point it out, " The first land Columbus saw ! " 

We came into sight of Jamaica in the late after- 
noon and sailed along the south coast as the shadows 
were falling. A well-wooded country we saw, as 
its first discoverer must have seen more than four 
hundred years before, a land of steep mountains and 
deep valleys, with here and there patches of vivid 
green that, those who knew, told us were the sugar 
plantations that were the gold mines of Jamaica in 
the sugar boom. And the mists rose up from the 
valleys, and the shadows grew deeper and the day 
died in a glory of red and gold, a sight so common 
that no one takes note of it; and the night with a 
sky of velvet, embroidered with diamonds, crystal 
clear, came sweeping down upon us — a cloak of 
darkness — as we steamed into Kingston Harbour. 

Columbus did not land in Jamaica on his first 
voyage, but he undoubtedly saw it, as we saw it, many 
and many a time. The memory of him was with me 
still as we landed. What to me were the comforts 
of the Myrtle Bank Hotel set right in Kingston, or 
of the Constant Spring out at the foot of the 
mountains ? No, that is ungrateful. As an old 
traveller, no one can appreciate better than I the 
comforts of a good hotel. But as I dreamt on a 
comfortable steamer, so I dreamt more vividly of the 
past on the verandah of the Myrtle Bank, looking 
down the palm avenue to the sea. The night air 
was heavy with spicy scents, and the fireflies wheeled 
and danced, living lights in the dark shadows under 
the greenery, all the voluptuousness of the tropics 
was here in this land of romance which Columbus 
found for Spain, and that later was the first great 
tropical possession of Britain. But Jamaica has 
been an unlucky land, and I doubt whether Britain 



6 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

has yet realised its value. It might be called the 
land of lost opportunities, so often have those who 
governed it let its good things pass by. I doubt 
whether Spain herself got any great good from this 
new possession; certainly Columbus found small 
peace here. With " his people dismayed and down- 
hearted, almost all his anchors lost and his vessels 
bored as full of holes as a honeycomb, driven by 
opposing winds and currents, he put into Puerto 
Bueno, in the parish of Saint Ann's. But not finding 
sufficient food or water " (probably water, as it is now 
known as Dry Harbour), "he sailed east again and 
put into a cove since known as Don Cristopher's 
Cove." His ships were mere wrecks, those brave 
castled ships that had sailed from Spain with such 
high hopes, and it was very certain that whatever 
might happen to them, back to Spain they could not 
go. It was a terrible situation, an awful strait in 
which those brave mariners found themselves over 
four hundred years ago. 

"You must see the parish of St Ann," said a 
Jamaican lady to me; "it is all green grass and 
white Indian cattle, and dark green pimento trees." 

In those days there was probably not much green 
grass, natural grasses grow roughly and in tufts, and 
there were no Indian cattle ; but the dark green 
pimento trees were there, their fragrance and that of 
many a tropical flower and tree must have been 
brought by the land breeze to the sailors in the 
ships. For Columbus sank his unseaworthy, worm- 
riddled ships in the harbour, sank them till the water 
came right up to their decks, a sign of the desperate- 
ness of his position, for no leader if he had any hope 
of redeeming the situation would have sunk the only 
means he had of returning to his own land. 

Think of it. The ships were aground within 




[.Face page 0. 



THE LOVELY CARIBBEAN SEA 7 

a bow-shot of the shore. I don't know how far 
that is, but certainly too far to swim easily in 
a tropical sea, they were sunk side by side and 
were placed in the "best possible state of defence," 
which probably means that every cooling current of 
air, the pleasant pungent sea breeze in the morning, 
and the aromatic land breeze in the evening were 
shut out. It must have had its effect upon the crews 
this lack of fresh air, though probably they were not 
greatly concerned about it. They very likely con- 
sidered as men did long after their time that the 
land breeze was dangerous and that the sea breeze 
gave them ague, and I expect they looked out over 
the shimmering sea and hated it with a bitter hatred 
and blamed pitilessly the man who brought them 
there. 

And yet in all the world I have not seen a more 
lovely sea than the sea that rings Jamaica. Some- 
times the wind blows it into ripples, sometimes a 
stronger wind beats it into white foam, the clouds 
gather, it grows dark, inky black, and the rain comes 
beating down, rain that must have swirled across the 
decks and threatened to swamp out the little ships — 
their prison. But oftenest, I know, that sea was 
still, lovely, with the shallows like great jewelled 
opals of tenderest translucent green in a setting of 
sparkling sapphires and pearls, and entrancing little 
coves fringed by mangroves where the coconut 
palms stand up tall and stately as near the water as 
they can get, and all this against a background of 
mountains wooded to their very peaks, makes a 
scene never to be forgotten. There were no coconut 
palms in the time of Columbus. They came from 
the mainland, a right royal gift of the Spaniards 
to the island they made their own, but there were 
the sea grapes, great straggling bushes with big 



8 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

round leaves and bunches of purple berries so like 
grapes that it is not till you taste them you find by 
their slightly acrid savour and the big stone in the 
middle that they are not. Still, to men after a 
voyage at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in 
the days of our King Henry VII., those sea grapes 
must have been a godsend, they and the luscious 
naseberries, which are sweet and sickly, but good to 
counteract scurvy. 

I can't like the naseberry. The tree it grows on 
is large and handsome, but the fruit itself, which is 
about the size of a russet apple, cannot be eaten ripe 
from the tree because it is full of a whitish astringent 
juice, but must be kept like the medlar till it is well 
on its way to rottenness and then it may be eaten with 
a spoon. Probably Columbus's men ate hundreds of 
them, grumbling that they had come out to find gold 
and silver, and their leader had brought them to a 
watery prison where they had to subsist on fish 
which they grew to loathe, cassava bread and nase- 
berries, occasionally traded by the Indians, sea grapes 
gathered by themselves — poor substitutes for the 
wheaten bread and peaches and grapes of their 
own land. 

Day after day, day after day, they looked out on 
that sea where there was never a sail. They were 
apparently cut off from all hopes of home, and their 
leader lay in his cabin crippled with gout. And then 
the despised food began to give out. 

In his despair Columbus sent out the first 
exploring expedition into Jamaica. Diego Mendez, 
one of the best and bravest of his officers, and three 
men, started to walk through Trelawny, St James, 
and Hanover, visiting the villages and interviewing 
the native chiefs and making treaties with them by 
which the forlorn company were to receive regular 



THE LONELY HILLSIDES 9 

supplies of food in exchange for fish hooks, knives, 
beads, combs, and such trifles as all the world over 
have taken the fancy of primitive man. 

I have been through these parishes — in a motor 
car. There are coconut walks there now, the tall 
and graceful palms standing out against the sky, 
sugar plantations, patches of vivid green, pimento 
groves with trees like great myrtles clothed in glossy 
dark green, and rows of broad-leaved bananas and 
plantains, and the air is fragrant with the scent of 
orange and lemon blossom and hundreds of other 
growing things. On the hill tops are the Great 
Houses of the pen keepers and planters set in 
gardens, with the overseers' and book - keepers' 
houses lower down, and as near the road as they 
can get, the shacks of the negro helpers and inde- 
pendent cultivators. Strangely enough, in a little 
island that has been settled by Europeans for over 
four hundred years, the roads that wander along the 
entrancing sea shore and by the mountain side often 
look into gullies, at the bottom of which it seems 
as if we might find the villages where Diego Mendez 
made treaties. I should hardly have been surprised if 
in one of the little lonely coves we had come across 
the sunken ships of Columbus fastened close together 
for safety and with little houses thatched over in bow 
and stern. There are wild places still in this island 
which, after all, is only 4207 square miles — of hillside 
— not much larger than a good sized station in 
Australia, and gullies waiting for man to come and 
turn to good account their wealth. Here is room, 
and more than room, for the dwellers in the great 
cities who have never seen a glorious sunset and 
know not the scent of a pimento grove. 

That meant for Columbus a weary time of 
waiting among dissatisfied men, for what adventurer, 



10 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

who had come out seeking gold and silver and 
precious stones, would be content to lie sweltering- — 
rotting, I expect they called it — even in the most 
beautiful cove in the world. Presently the story 
went round that Columbus had been banished, his 
prestige was gone, and two brothers named Porras 
rose as leaders of the mutineers. 

Even the life of the veteran was in danger. As 
I write this on my verandah, looking out over 
the blue Caribbean, with a little pauperised tingting 
bird sitting on the rail calling aloud that I have 
always provided his breakfast and that even little 
slim black birds with bright yellow eyes can be 
led astray by too much ease and comfort, I seem 
to realise with what bitterness the iron entered 
into the soul of the old man. There was no actual 
danger, they had enough to eat, and could sleep, 
sheltered and in peace, and sooner or later he 
thought help would come. Patience, he preached, 
patience. But the mutineers would have their way. 
They built or stole ten canoes and went out along 
the coast, ravaging and pillaging. The first of the 
pirates who ravaged the coasts of Jamaica and their 
victims, were not the white people but the gentle 
brown folk whom Columbus had designed to make 
peacefully their slaves. " They wandered from village 
to village," says his chronicler, "a dissolute and 
lawless gang, supporting themselves by fair means 
or foul, according as they met with kindness or 
hostility, and passing like a pestilence through the 
land." 

I can almost understand it and forgive. Almost 
anything was better than sitting still watching the 
sun climb over the mountain in the morning and 
sink into the sea in the evening, waiting, waiting, 
waiting, for the relief that was so long in coming. 



A LITTLE HANDFUL OF PEOPLE 11 

For Mendez having got to Hispaniola had then to 
make his way to Spain, and it was not till the 
28th June 1504 that relief ships came sailing in 
and Columbus was able to leave Jamaica. He died 
in 1506, and by way of recompense, I suppose, in 
1508 his son Diego was appointed Governor of the 
Indies, and in 1509 went out to San Domingo, 
taking with him his wife, who was a cousin of King 
Ferdinand. 

In Jamaica under the Spaniards, a translation 
by Frank Cundall and Joseph Pieterez of documents 
found in the archives of Seville in Spain, the curious 
may read the slow story of the Spanish settling of 
Jamaica and its gradual evacuation. They did not 
come in with a rush, for there was no fabulous 
wealth of gold and silver here. Again and again 
the Spanish King urges the Governors to seek for 
gold, but though doubtless they sought diligently, 
for the finding would have been the making of 
them, they found none, and we cannot but feel that 
the Spanish colonists were poor and of but little 
account. If you read Hans Sloane on the remains 
he found round about the old city of Seville, your 
sense of romance is satisfied, but the cold facts 
taken from the archives of Seville in Spain speak 
of a little handful of poor people struggling with 
an exuberant nature. Here, as I write, there comes 
to me the smell of very poor tobacco, only fragrant 
in the open air, and looking up I see a negro woman 
in leisurely fashion digging up the weeds among the 
grass of what will, some day I hope, be a lawn 
under the coconut palms. How leisurely is that 
fashion I can hardly describe, save by mentioning 
she only gets 3s. 6d. a week, boards and lodges 
herself and works accordingly. She has bare feet, 
a nondescript, drab-coloured garment that calls itself 



12 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

a dress, and a ragged hat made out of a banana 
trash and bound with a string of bright red. She 
is of African descent, but not unlike her probably 
were the Indians who worked in the fields for those 
first Jamaican colonists. Yes, she is content, fairly 
content I should say, almost too content, or she 
would strive a little to better herself. 

I should like to have seen the beginnings of the 
Spanish occupation of Jamaica. How they slowly 
set up their hatos round the island, choosing out 
the fertile river bottoms and fencing in their lands 
lightly, so lightly that soon the lonely parts of 
the island were overrun with wild cattle and pigs 
descended from those that escaped. They planted 
coconut palms and brought over oranges and lemons 
and limes from their native land which took root 
and flourished, so that Hans Sloane, writing thirty 
years after the Spaniards had been driven out, talks 
of the orange and lime walks, and nowadays if you 
want orange trees on your land you have only to 
throw out one or two rotten oranges to have a crop 
of young seedlings. 

"The buildings of the Spaniards," says Hans 
Sloane, " on this island were usually one Story high, 
having a Porch, a Parlour, and at each end a Room 
with small ones behind for Closets etc. They built 
with Posts put deep into the ground, on the sides 
their Houses were plaistered up with Clay on Reeds, 
or made of the split Truncs of Cabbage Trees nail'd 
close to one another and covered with Tiles or 
Palmetto Thatch. The Lowness as well as the 
fixing the Posts deep in the Earth was for fear their 
Houses should be ruin'd by Earthquakes, as well 
as for Coolness." 

Immediately they settled, the Spaniards rounded- 
up the luckless Indians. Their lot was hard enough, 



THE LOT OF THE INDIANS 13 

though possibly not as hard as that of those driven 
to work in the mines, and as labourers on the hatos 
they soon began to fail their masters. Perhaps that 
is not to be wondered at. Las Casas, the benevolent 
bishop, who is responsible for the first introduction 
of negro slaves into the New World says, "they 
hanged the unfortunates by thirteens in honour of 
the thirteen apostles. I have beheld them throw 
the Indian infants to their dogs ; I have seen five 
caciques burnt alive ; I have heard the Spaniards 
borrow the limb of an human being to feed their 
dogs and next day return a quarter to the lender." 

It seems a gruesome enough story, and where 
the mercy came in from Las Casas' point of view 
in substituting negroes for the Indians I do not 
know, especially as they say the negroes were 
infinitely inferior to the Indians, and as long as the 
Spaniards could get the latter they preferred them. 

But that the Spaniards destroyed all the Indians 
there is no doubt. They were a mild and indolent 
brown people, very like those now to be seen in 
British Guiana, but historians differ as to their 
numbers: one man says that "in Jamaica and the 
adjacent islands within less than twenty years the 
Spaniards destroyed more than 1,200,000," but later 
researches have brought the figure in Jamaica down 
to about 60,000, a much more likely number, and 
after all quite enough to destroy in twenty years. 

They lived, these Spanish conquerors, on the 
island for over one hundred and fifty years, a poor 
little company, or so I gather, but rich in the fruits 
of the earth. And the people at home took a 
fatherly interest in them. If an emigrant left his 
wife at home, he had to have her written consent 
to his going and give security that he would return 
for her within three years. And this security was 



14 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

evidently very necessary, for among the archives at 
Seville there is a note touching a lady of Ciudad 
Rodrigo complaining to the Queen in 1533 that her 
husband had deserted her twenty-five years before 
to go to the Indies and had married another lady 
in Jamaica, where he was settled. But though the 
Queen ordered that the matter should be looked 
into and justice done, there is no end to the 
story. 

Though we talk about the Spanish towns in 
Jamaica, they were really very small. In July 1534 
there were but eighty citizens in the town of Seville, 
and of these soon after only twenty remained, the 
others having died of " diseases and pestilences " ! 
And we are told that in twenty years they had not 
reared ten infants, a pitiful return. In the first record 
we get of Spanish Town, it had only one hundred 
inhabitants. In 1597 a Governor named Fernando 
Melgarejo de Cordova came out for six years. He 
brought with him by permission four servants, jewels 
to the value of 200 ducats (roughly worth £40), a 
black slave, four swords, four daggers, and four of 
each kind of other arms, and his salary was 300,000 
maravedis, which sounds a great deal, but as a 
maravedi was equal to half a farthing he only had 
£156 a year, surely a small sum even for those times 
when money was worth so much more, and Jamaica, 
too, as his advisers were never tired of impressing on 
the King of Spain, was a valuable colony, and if it 
fell into the hands of the King's enemies none of the 
other colonies would be safe. 

When Melgarejo arrived, he found the Englishman 
Sir Anthony Shirley had sacked and held to ransom 
the Villa de la Vega, the city of the plains, the 
capital, guided thereto by a native Indian, and proud 
as we are of our old-time mariners, still the times 



THE STRUGGLES OF THE SPANIARD 15 

were rough and merciless, their ways matched the 
times, and we may pity the people who waked up 
that hot August morning in 1597 to find that their 
hereditary enemies the English were upon them. 
Sir Anthony Shirley claimed that while he was in 
Jamaica he was "absolute master of the whole," 
and he seems to have made arrangements for his 
return with the comfortable conviction that he could 
certainly provision his ships with beef and cassava, 
to say nothing of the cooling fruits which by this 
time were plentiful and must have been of inestimable 
value to these wanderers upon the seas. 

Sir Anthony Shirley was only one of many. For 
these corsairs who soon came to Jamaica regularly 
were drawn from all the nations of Europe and 
"they rob and they trade," wrote the worried 
Governor. 

And when they didn't trade and they didn't rob 
they helped themselves not only to wood and water 
but to beef and pork, that was running wild it is 
true, but naturally the Spaniards considered it theirs, 
and then sometimes, when they had raided a little 
too often, the tables were turned and they left their 
bones there. 

Don Fernando goes at length into his prowess in 
going out in a boat to defend a frigate — a frigate was 
a very small ship in those days — that two English 
launches had boarded and he says he retook that 
frigate and made them retire. More, he sent Captain 
Sebastian Gonzalez — there is a swagger in his name 
— with troops by land to Port Negrillo, there "to 
wait till the Captain of the English corsair should 
go to obtain water and capture him ; and they lay 
in wait for him and killed those who landed and 
brought back their ears, broke the jars to pieces and 
burnt the boat." 



16 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

And so the story of Jamaica goes on in the Seville 
archives, a tale of a small people with stocks of 
horses and cattle and pigs, a tale of struggles to 
build churches, and to hold the island, because 
though no gold or silver had been found, it was yet 
too central to allow any other nation to settle there. 

But it rose in value, for the next Governor, Alonzo 
de Miranda, had his salary increased to close on 
£400 a year. He was much worried by a Portuguese 
corsair named Mota, who " with two launches and a 
tender was going along the whole coast sacking and 
plundering the ranches and seizing the inhabitants 
and doing many other injuries, to remedy which I 
was obliged to assemble a fleet by sea, and go myself 
by land with soldiers to defeat the design of the 
enemies and they went away from the coast. With 
all that, I have had information that in the remote 
cattle hunting places they land, and with some of the 
cow catchers who have run away from Espanola, 
whom they bring, they dress hides and supply them- 
selves with meat." This, he goes on to say, "cannot 
be remedied without much cost and expense." 

When first I went to Jamaica, a friend, Mr 
Clarence Lopez, with kindness I can never forget, 
lent me a house in the northern part of the island 
in the parish of Trelawny. It was the Great House 
on the Hyde, a pen about eight miles as the crow 
flies from the sea. Jamaica is 144 miles long at the 
longest portion and 49 miles broad at the broadest, 
it is little more than half the size of Wales, but when 
I went to that house set on the side of a mountain 
with a glorious view of hill and valley, coco-palm 
and banana, I went to the very loneliest place I have 
ever lived in in my life, and I have been in many 
lands. It is one of the loveliest too. Behind are 
the mountains, clothed to their peaks in woodland, 



THE HYDE 17 

bound together with all manner of creeping vines and 
the mountains fling their arms round, so that they seem 
to guard the old house from the winds of the south, 
and all in the ground grow pimento and orange and 
lemon trees, handsome, broad-leaved bread-fruit and 
tall naseberry trees, while the little garden on a 
plateau just behind the house is a wilderness of 
roses, pink and white, and red and yellow, and 
fragrant as the first roses that ever grew in a Persian 
garden. The house is two storied, and though it has 
many annexes the main building stands by itself. 
Much money has been expended upon it. Two great 
flights of stone steps lead up to the porch at the 
front door, the floor of which is tessellated as carefully 
as if it had been done in Italy ; all the handles of 
the doors are of heavy cut glass and so are the door 
plates, while gilded beading decorates what they 
call in Jamaica the two great halls, that is the 
dining room downstairs and its fellow upstairs. The 
floors are of polished mahogany and so is the 
staircase ; but no one had lived in it for years and 
" Ichabod " was written over everything. 

It had been built with a view to defence, there 
was no doubt about it. On the porch a couple of 
men with guns could hold the front of the house, 
in the hall there is a trap-door leading to the storey 
below, cellars half underground, and in the walls in 
front are loop-holes through which a man might 
easily shoot. The second storey overhangs the first 
a little and there is not a corner but could easily 
be held by a man with a gun. Yes, decidedly it was 
built for defence, such defence as might be needed 
in the end of the eighteenth or beginning of the 
nineteenth centuries. The first night we spent there, 
my companion, Eva Parsons, and I alone with the 
weird black servants who had seen but very few 



18 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

white people and whose ways were strange to us, 
we felt the loneliness keenly. Eva was ill, and she 
was a Londoner born and bred. There were rats 
racing about downstairs, there were bats making 
curious sounds in the roof, and when a potoo bird 
gave vent to its long drawn-out uncanny cry, Eva 
abandoned courage and came flying into my room. 
And she was no coward. I comforted her to the 
best of my ability, and we decided that until we got 
the house a little more habitable one bedroom was 
quite big enough for the two of us. 

But what must it have been like on those ranches 
in the old days when the Spaniards were few and 
scattered, and the corsairs, English and Portuguese 
and French and Dutch, and a nondescript crowd that 
were worse than any, came cruising along the coasts 
and landed and attacked the lonely houses ? Think 
of the women who lay still shivering or crept to each 
other's rooms and wondered was that the pirates or 
was it only a rat, or possibly a bat in the roof ? Or 
that weird sound ? — Was it a potoo bird killing rats ? 
or was it an English sailor calling to his mate in his 
harsh, unknown tongue ? 

" Except in the principal one, Caguya," says 
Sedeno de Albornoz, speaking of the corsairs, "they 
anchor in the ports without being disturbed by any- 
one, and refit and careen their ships with perfect 
ease as if in their country. I can certify that, while 
a prisoner of theirs, I have heard with much concern 
many conversations with regard to colonising this 
island and fortifying two ports, one on the north side 
and one on the south. I always told them that there 
was a garrison of ten companies of infantry stationed 
by the King our master, besides three in the town, 
and two of mounted mulattoes and free negroes 
armed with hocking knives and half moons, of whom 



THE ENGLISH INVASION 19 

they are much afraid. They did not like that reply, 
and though doubtful contradicted me, saying they 
knew very well what was in the island. It is very 
certain that it is more important to them than any 
other, as it is better and more fertile and abundant 
than all those they have settled in the Indies ; nor 
is there another like it in the Indies. Cuba and 
Espanola are indeed much larger, but Jamaica in 
its entirety is more plentiful than these, for it has 
much horned stock, and herds of tame swine, and 
wild ones in great numbers, from the hunting of 
which every year is obtained a quantity of lard that 
serves instead of oil for cooking." So much lard 
that there are people who declare that Montego Bay, 
from which much lard was exported, took its name 
from a corruption of the Spanish word for lard. 

"Likewise," goes on Sedeno, "there is a large 
number of good horses, donkeys, and mules, fisheries 
of turtle and dainty fish, and a very fine climate from 
its healthy airs and waters." Indeed he cannot say 
enough for the island. He finishes, "there are now 
a little over 300 colonists, mostly poor people. 
Nearly 450 men bear arms," so I suppose he only 
counts those as colonists who actually settled on the 
land, " including the hunters and country folks, all of 
whom are labouring people, strong and suitable for 
war by reason of their courageous spirits if indeed 
lacking military discipline." 

And even as he wrote the enemy was within the 
gates, and the Governor of Jamaica writes despair- 
ingly to the King of Spain. He says 53 ships of 
war — there were really 38— came in sight of the 
island, and they bore 15,000 seamen and soldiers, 
while the invaders claim they conquered with 7000 
soldiers and a sea regiment of 1000. But he probably 
is right when he says " there are 8000 souls scattered 



20 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

about the mountains, children, women, and slaves, 
without any hope of protection except from God, 
with the enemy's knife every hour at their throats." 
We hear so little about the women and children in 
these wars of conquest and yet on them most heavily 
of all must have pressed the difficulties and the 
dangers. 

And the Governor died a prisoner of war, and 
finally this Governorship which never seems to have 
been much sought after and was worth nothing, now 
descended upon Christoval Arnaldo Ysassi, who was 
not even a trained soldier. 

The rest of the pitiful story is one of flight, 
flight, flight, the Spaniards always pressed northward, 
always begging and praying help from Cuba, begging 
for bread and getting a stone. 

For we say Jamaica was conquered in 1655, but 
it takes a long while for a people who are holding 
a land by guerilla warfare to understand that they are 
beaten, and it was evident that Ysassi was heartened 
by many a skirmish that seemed to him a success. 
Towards the end of October 1656, however, we find 
the King of Spain writing — "The English have a 
foothold in Jamaica, obstructing the commerce of 
all the islands to windward with the coasts of the 
mainland and of New Spain. The fleets and galleons 
run great risk in passing by Jamaica." 

But even in March of the next year the Viceroy 
of Mexico writes to Ysassi congratulating him on 
his appointment to the Government of Jamaica, 
though he himself was beginning to realise what a 
hollow farce it was. 

However he made it unpleasant for the arrogant 
invaders. "I now send a smart English sergeant," 
he writes, " who will give your Excellency lengthy 
news of the whole state of the island." Poor English 



THE ENGLISH SERGEANT 21 

sergeant, smart even in his captivity ! I hope they 
did not make things very hard for him in Mexico. 
That is the worst of history. The ultimate fate of 
the pawns is never told, only in these state papers 
there is that one entry that pictures for us the upright 
young figure with the keen blue eyes and firm set 
mouth, firm even in misfortune. God rest his soul ! 
and God bless him for keeping up the honour of 
the English nation. 

Even when reliefs did come, they brought little 
comfort to the harassed Governor. In August 1657, 
two captains landed at Ochos Kios, not far from 
where Columbus spent his weary year. They were 
supposed to help the Spanish Governor but, as 
soldiers, they pointed out to him the hopelessness of 
the situation. They said he could not succeed in 
the interior, that " it will cost some trouble to capture 
any horses from the enemy, and with infantry the risk 
is manifest." I have seen the country and I can't 
imagine how they thought to use horses. 

But in spite of these Job's comforters, Ysassi kept 
writing bravely to the Viceroy that he was harrying 
the enemy, that still they could not get any good from 
the hatos that they held. 

" Those who come to get beef, die without anyone 
being left to carry the news ..." What a picture 
of bloodthirsty, merciless war it gives us ! When the 
great golden moon sends her light streaming through 
the coconut walks, and the glorious night is heavy 
with the scent of the orange flowers and the pimento 
groves, I cannot but think of those bloody days in 
the seventeenth century when the English drove the 
Spaniards to the remote corners of the island, and the 
Spaniards in their turn killed remorselessly, so that 
none should go back to tell the tale. 

Again he reports in the middle of September, 

c 



22 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

" I sallied out upon the road to encounter them with 
the few troops I had, which were about 80 men" | 
(Oh, for the might of Spain !) " because the others | 
are without shoes and not accustomed to the dis- | 
comforts of the open country." t 

He descants on their ragged condition. "The ; 
few soldiers I have are naked and barefoot and | 
cannot stand the mosquitoes" (I sympathise with 
them) — "Please help them." He has not even paper 
to write his reports and the whole history is 
punctuated with prayers for provisions, "for soldiers 
will fight badly if they have nothing to eat and are 
badly clothed. I assure your Excellency that some 
die reduced to sticks." 

It was evidently a prolonged series of skirmishes, 
with sometimes one party conquering, sometimes the 
other, but the Spaniards seem to have thought their 
re-establishment was merely a matter of time. Once 
they gave their minds to the matter they must win, 
and meanwhile Ysassi was doing useful work holding 
the place till the good time came. They could not 
believe they had lost Jamaica. 

"For the love of God," he prays the Governor of 
Cuba, "I again ask you to send me not linen, or a I 
new shirt, because I do not make use of it " (a gallant 
of Spain !) "but some old cloth." 

But brave Ysassi was nearing the end. In 
July 1658 he had reinforcements from Mexico but \ 
is obliged to write sadly — "In fine, sir, on this 
26th June the enemy defeated me with the loss of I; 
300 men although his loss, so far as troops are y 
concerned, was greater." (The pitiful pride!) "If i 
they beat me," he says in effect, "me starving, 
short of ammunition, provisions, everything that $ 
might enable me to make good, at least I have 
given them something better than they gave me." 



THE FIRST MAROONS 23 

And so he sends the remnant of his army into the 
mountains to forage for themselves and he speaks 
of the negro slaves, the first mention we have of 
the Maroons that have figured so largely in Jamaican 
history. 

"The negroes, Sir," he writes to his King, "who 
have remained fugitives from their masters who have 
abandoned the island and your Majesty's arms, are 
more than two hundred, but many have died, and 
I inform your Majesty so that you may command 
what is most suitable to your Royal Service to 
whoever may come to govern the island. I have 
not done a small thing in conserving them, keeping 
them under my obedience, when they have been 
sought after with papers from the enemy. I have 
promised their Chiefs freedom in your Majesty's 
name but have not given it until I receive an order 
for it." As if his gift of freedom could have mattered 
very much to the negroes, who already had the 
freedom of the hills and the hunted Spaniards much 
at their mercy. 

And here again we are faced with contradictions 
that make me glad it is not my business to write 
history. 

" The Spaniards in their authority over their 
slaves," writes the very verbose Bridges, "appear 
to have been restrained by no law whatever; but 
were sanctioned in every act which could extort their 
labour or secure their obedience, -so long however 
as the strength of the native Indians withstood the 
execrable cruelties of their Castilian taskmasters, the 
negroes were considered as very inferior workmen. 
Ovando complained of their continued importation 
to Hispaniola, where he found them but idle labourers, 
who took every opportunity of escaping into the 
woods, and assisting the natives in their feeble 



24 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

attempts to throw off the Spanish yoke. But as i 
Indian life wasted, negro labour became necessary to 
supply its place." 

And yet after that he goes on to say : " The 
British conquerors profited but little by the negroes 1« 
whom they found in the island of Jamaica, and I'i 
whose services were inseparable from the hard fate i 
of their expatriated owners. . . . Not five hundred & 
slaves were employed in the cultivation containing U 
more than two million acres of the richest land, ja 
The degeneracy of their masters had reduced all U 
classes to nearly an equality ; so that in fact slavery I 
hardly existed in Jamaica. Poverty had for a series : 
of years forbidden a further importation of Africans ; | 
the negro race had rapidly decayed, and the few 1 
that were left were employed to supply the wants ! ; . 
of the indolent Spaniards in Saint Jago, by the 
cultivation of their hatos in the country, and were pre- 
served with the greatest care and cherished as their I 
own children. . . . The easy condition of the slaves i 
was manifested in their attachment to the fallen | 
fortunes of their masters ; and they were confidently i 
left by them to retain possession of an island which H 
they could no longer keep themselves." Surely a j 
curious way to end a paragraph which began by | 
declaiming against the unbridled cruelty of the II 
Spaniards. So they were not all cruel, and even Pi 
troubled Ysassi felt sure that the runaway negroes 
would prefer the Spanish rule to the English. 
Perhaps there was something in the devil they knew. 

In Spain the enquiries into the state of the 
country appear to have been endless. It was easier 
to hold the north side of the island, the fleeing 
Spaniards wrote them, and one man tells how his 
hunting slaves were enabled to help the unfortunates 
who had abandoned their hatos on the south and 



FINAL CONQUEST 25 

fled into the mountains in the north. I see those 
frightened women and children, toiling along through 
the mountain passes, perhaps taking it in turns to 
ride a mule or donkey, afraid of the hunting slaves, 
savage men with little clothing and yet thankful for 
the meat and wild fruits they gave them. And they 
said that in the first three years they had killed 
nearly 2500 of the enemy's men, " while on our side 
very few were lost. The enemy also suffered from 
a pestilence from which more than 6000 died." And 
so they buoyed themselves up with false hopes. 
But whether they were killed or wounded or died 
of pestilence these persistent English came on and 
pushed them farther and farther towards the north. 
Even the mountains were no refuge, and we read how 
sick men, women and children, Spanish colonists and 
slaves, "embarked in one of his Majesty's smacks," 
that made several trips by order of the Governor 
of Cuba who charged (the wretch ! to take such 
advantage of their desperate straits) "for each person 
removed from Jamaica, even infants, at the rate of 
ten and twelve pesos " (about thirty shillings). One 
family even paid him more than three times that, 
so evidently there were pickings attached to a 
Spanish Governorship. 

And at last in February 1660 even brave Ysassi 
must have seen, and seen thankfully, I should think, 
that the end was approaching. He was defeated 
at Manegua (Moneague) — it is a pleasure resort up 
among the hills nowadays, where the tourists come 
from England and America— and at a Council of War 
the abandonment of the island was recommended. 

Slowly, slowly, it had come to that, after all the 
hopes, all the sacrifices, all the fighting, all the long, 
long struggle and suffering, after nearly five years 
of it they must go. The English offered terms, but 



26 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

the Spanish were proud and haggled, and though the 
English seem to have been more than kindly and 
courteous the Spaniards were loth to give in, and 
finally we find D'Oyley, the English Governor, writing 
" the time for capitulating has expired." The English 
would have sent them to Cuba, sent them with all 
honour, but the Spanish Governor, who had never 
been more than the shadow of a Governor of Jamaica, 
could not give in. He complains that the English 
only undertook to send away the Spaniards to Cuba, 
"as the greater part of the force were Indians, 
Negroes, and Mulattos, without counting Slaves and 
Coloured domestic servants. ... I determined to 
die sooner than abandon or leave the meanest of 
those who had been with me . . . the troops," 
he goes on pathetically, he had advised the Governor 
of Cuba, "were very dejected and weak from want 
of food and eaten up with lice, for not even the 
Captains had more clothes than what they wore." 
So he decided to build two canoes and in fifteen 
days they were finished and provided with sails, 
"from some sheets belonging to the hunters who 
had escaped." We can see those canoes building, 
the careful watch that had to be kept lest the 
English should catch them, the subdued triumph 
when they were all complete, the despair when it 
was found they would only hold seventy-six people, 
and so, after all his protestations, " I was obliged to 
leave in the island thirty-six under the charge of one 
of the Captains who was assisting me." 

And they call the cove where he embarked 
Runaway Bay. It is a misnomer, and a slur on the 
memory of a brave man. Surely no man ever turned 
his back on the enemy more reluctantly. 

They came in safety to Cuba and no mention is 
ever made of the thirty-six left behind and the 



RELICS OF THE SPANIARDS 27 

captain who stayed with them. I like to think 
that Ysassi sent for them when he could. 

The road that runs right round the island passes 
close to that little bay now, and the waters of the 
blue Caribbean, calm and still, mirror the blue skies 
above as they did on that long ago May day when 
the last Spanish Governor of Jamaica embarked in 
a frail canoe and waving his hand to those he left 
behind set sail for Cuba to the north. This was 
the end of the high adventure. The very end ! 
The Spanish rule was over, the valued island that 
lay right in the fairway of commerce — it lies so 
still — was lost for ever to the Spanish Crown and 
its last Governor was going away a broken and 
discredited man. 

And bitterly the Spaniards regretted the loss. 
Pedro de Bayoha, "Governor of the City of Cuba," 
wrote to the King setting forth its many advantages, 
" any fleet however large can lie and careen its ships, 
and any army can march, as food is very plentiful 
and the island abounding in tame and wild cattle 
as well as swine, the quantity of which is so great 
that every year twenty thousand head are killed 
for the lard and fat and no use is made of the meat." 
So we gather that Ysassi was not very good at 
the commissariat. Perhaps the English harried him 
too much. 

It has been said with some surprise that there 
are few relics of the Spaniards in the island. For 
me, I marvel that there is after all these years still 
so much. The oranges and the limes, the pome- 
granates and the coconut palms are a monument 
to them, and still at Montego Bay is to be seen 
the outlines of a dark stone fort that overlooked 
the beautiful bay and guarded the town. And 
though Indian corn has been sown in the court- 



28 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

yards for many a long day, some of the old cannon 
that belonged to his Spanish Majesty still lie about. 
The climate of Jamaica is against the preservation 
of relics of the past. £ "Tis a very strange thing," 
says Hans Sloane, accustomed to the slow growth 
of Northern climes, "to see in how short a time 
a plantation formerly clear of trees and shrubs will 
grow foul, which comes from two causes ; the one 
not stubbing up the roots, whence arise young sprouts, 
and the other the fertility of the soil. The settlements 
and plantations of not only the Indians but even 
the Spaniards being quite overgrown with tall trees, 
so that there is no footsteps of such a thing left 
were it not for the old palisadoes, buildings, orange 
walks, etc., which show plainly the formerly cleared 
places where plantations have been." And Sloane, 
who was physician to the Duke of Albemarle, the 
Governor, writes of 1688, not thirty years after the 
last Spanish Governor had fled. 

Even now in Jamaica there are tales of buried 
treasure. In 1916 the "Busha" or superintendent 
of an estate in Westmoreland was engaged in pulling 
down a stout stone wall, evidently built in the old 
days by slave labour. Each stone was well and 
truly laid, and tradition said the wall was Spanish. 
One of the workmen said he had come to a hollow 
place. And sure enough there was a large jar 
stuffed full of old Spanish gold and silver coins, 
hidden I suppose when the Spanish owner of the 
hato fled before the incoming of the English. 
Tradition says there are many more, but within 
the last year or two the Crown, I hear, has insisted 
on its right of treasure trove, so that it is exceedingly 
unlikely anyone finding such will proclaim the fact 
aloud. The Spanish colonists it is true were but 
a poor people, but even the poorest have need of 



THE LITTLE GOLD SOLDIER 29 

some little money, and in the days when banks were 
not much in vogue, cash that would not go into 
the breeches pocket had to be kept somewhere. 

Bridges tells how " a miniature figure of pure 
gold representing a Spanish soldier with a matchlock 
in his hand was lately found in the woods of the 
parish of Manchester. How it came there remains 
a mystery ; for those extensive forests bear no marks 
of having ever been opened, or even penetrated 
until lately." And Bridges wrote about 1828. 

But gold is not to be lightly worn or washed 
away. I can imagine the young Spanish wife who 
owned that little golden soldier and counted him 
a very precious possession. And so, when she fled 
with her baby in her arms and her little daughter 
clinging to her skirts, she carried it with her. And 
then came the day when the English pressed them 
hard, and perhaps her husband, perhaps the head 
slave, called to her to hurry, they must get away, 
and the baby cried because she had so little to 
give it, and the little maid whimpered when she 
fell among the leafy thorns and rough stones on 
the steep mountain path, and her mother bending 
over to comfort her dropped the little golden Spanish 
soldier that was her treasure from her bundle and 
never knew of her loss till it was too late to go 
back to look for it, and there he lay for close 
on one hundred and sixty years till some English- 
man found him and reported the find to verbose, 
moralising, Bridges. 

The author of Old St James too tells a tale of 
Spanish treasure. He says that sometime in the 
eighteenth century two Spaniards visited " Success," 
an estate in the north of the island not far from the 
sea-shore. They showed a plan said to have been 
copied from one held by a Spanish family locating 



30 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

the position of valuable documents buried upon the 
estate. There were the remains of an old fort, and 
using the walls as a starting-post the point fixed 
upon was the centre of the estate's mill-house. Not 
unnaturally, the visitors wanted to take down the 
mill-house, undertaking to rebuild it and leave every- 
thing as they found it. But the owners objected, 
perhaps also not unnaturally, for the mill-house was 
the most important part of the estate and an owner 
who would live in any tumble-down makeshift himself 
would often spend large sums upon his mill-house and 
machinery. Permission was refused, though tradition 
was with the Spaniards. For all I know those 
papers may be there still. The mill was one of 
the last to use cattle as power, and when excavations 
were being made for the new steam mill, two wells 
were found, one with water and the other in which 
water had obviously not been found. It was filled 
with soil of a different character from that surrounding 
it. "The water," says the author, "was evidently 
that which supplied the fort and it is natural to 
think that valuables or other papers might have been 
buried in the other." 

There is still among the older people a certain 
faith in enchanted jars buried in the earth or left 
in caves by the Spaniards when they fled the country. 
In the Eio Cobre there is a table of gold which rises 
up at noon every day, but though it has been seen 
by more than one person no one yet has succeeded 
in getting it before it sinks back under the waters. 
This, I am credibly informed — you may believe it or 
not as you please — is because the Spaniards killed 
a slave to watch over the treasure and no one has 
been quick enough to throw their hat, knife, or 
handkerchief over it and so break the enchantment. 

There was a poor slave woman once who was 



SPANISH GOLD 31 

ill and unable to finish her task, so the driver made 
her stay behind and do what she had left undone. 
She worked all night, and weary and worn, the task 
was not yet done when her hoe struck something 
that gave out a jingling sound. She looked carefully 
and found a Spanish jar, and with such important 
information dared even approach the high and mighty 
master himself. On going to inspect, he found so 
large a jar it had to be pulled out by oxen and 
was full to the top with golden doubloons. So he 
rewarded the woman with her freedom and gave her 
enough to live on all her life. At least that is the 
story that was told to me. It is a comfort to read 
of Spanish Gold which for so long has stood in 
my mind for fanciful treasure, really materialising 
to some one's advantage. 

More especially in the north of the island is this 
faith in hidden treasure strong. I was told seriously 
by a young man once that just beyond Montego Bay 
some very handsome brass cannon were dug up and 
so curiously wrought were they that they were 
polished and set up close to where they were found 
on the shore. But they did not stay there long. 
One night a Spanish sloop was seen off the coast, 
next morning she was gone, so were the guns, and 
no one knows what has become of them. 

They tell much the same story about a great jar 
of gold which was supposed to have been buried in 
a cane piece in St Thomas. One. night the Spaniards 
came, gagged and bound the watchman — I did not 
know every cane piece had a watchman, but so the 
story runs — and dug up the jar leaving a sum of 
money for the watchman and the hole so that the 
owners of that field might have some idea of what 
they had missed. 

I am afraid these two last stories are purely 



32 BRITAIN'S FIRST TROPICAL COLONY 

apocryphal, but many people believe in them and 
they serve to show how fixed in Jamaica is the faith 
in Spanish Gold. 

At Kempshot, on top of a high hill, Miss 
Maxwell Hall two or three years ago was roused 
night after night by the tramping of feet along the 
hillside. At first the noise was a mystery of the 
night then it ceased, but a week or two later she 
found that some great caves on the estate had been 
entered and extensive digging had gone on. It was 
impossible that anything could have been found, for 
the Maxwell Halls themselves had dug out those 
caves thoroughly searching not for Spanish treasure 
but for Arawak remains. It was evident that a 
large company had gone there nightly. The place 
had an evil reputation and she knew that not two 
or three men would have lightly dared its dangers 
even for promise of gold, and broken and discarded 
rum bottles showed how the investigators had been 
bucked up with "Dutch courage." 

A little treasure will go a long way in making 
stories, and one jar of coin found will supply material 
for a dozen. But it is interesting to think that if 
you buy a plot of land in Jamaica, especially in the 
north, you may just chance to buy with it a jar 
of gold. 



CHAPTER II 

THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

In this year of Our Lord, 1922, there are still people 
who regard Jamaica as a far, far distant country, and 
when it was conquered in 1660 it must have been 
farther from the British Isles than any spot now on 
this earth. Indeed, few people would know where it 
was and fewer still cared. But some — the wise 
ones, the Great Protector among them, rejoiced over 
this new possession. It seemed as if the wild tales 
the seamen told of adventure on the Spanish Main 
were now put into concrete form. Spain had drawn 
great wealth from these new lands ; was some of that 
great wealth to come to the northern isle ? 

But the beginning was very difficult. 

Here was an island, a beautiful island truly, but a 
rugged and heavily timbered land, a fertile land, but 
the mountains so entrancing and so inaccessible, were 
full of dangers, known and unknown. And the 
known were deadly. The Spaniards still lurked in 
their leafy depths, and even when they left they 
encouraged their abandoned slaves to keep up the 
feud, and no man could stray from the armed shelter 
of his comrades without risking death, often a painful 
and cruel death. 

Among the English themselves it was not all 
peace, because they were unhappily divided into 
Roundheads and Cavaliers, fanatics and men of 

S3 



34 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

license if we take extremes, and the two parties 
again and again were at each other's throats. 

And even if there had not been two parties, the 
soldier as a colonist was a dead failure. He did not 
want to try and develop the land that fell to his lot. 
He was an adventurer, a fine adventurer often, but 
on the whole more given to destruction than to the 
building up of a colony. What the first settlers looked 
to find was literally gold and silver, pearls, and precious 
stones. They felt their work was done when they 
had conquered the land. They thought they had a 
right to sit down and reap the harvest of their labour. 

And of course there wasn't any harvest. That 
wealth lay hidden in the soil they did not and could 
not understand. Indeed they did not want to under- 
stand. For if the land was to produce they must 
labour, labour under a tropical sun and under con- 
ditions that to them were strange. And even if 
they did labour to get results, there must be a market 
and as yet there was no market. All they could 
hope for was to get enough to keep themselves alive. 
Added to this, their pay was in arrears. 

No money, a climate that because they were 
unaccustomed to it they regarded as pestilential, 
and idle hands, no wonder these conquerors of 
Jamaica were discontented, no wonder they roamed 
through the savannahs slaying ruthlessly the cattle 
and horses than ran wild in what seemed to the 
newcomers countless numbers. And so presently it 
happened that the cattle that had amply supplied 
the buccaneers for many decades were all slain and 
the men who had declined to plant were starving. 
They did not want to settle on the land. They 
wanted a little more excitement in their lives. In the 
end, I think, the average inhabitant of Jamaica had 
plenty of that commodity. 



SETTLERS AT PORT MORANT 35 

To this boiling pot Cromwell sent out 1000 Irish 
men and 1000 Irish women. I can find nothing but 
the bare notification that they arrived, and it hardly 
seems to me those 2000 Irish can have helped 
matters much, whether they were poor convicts or 
political prisoners. 

Somebody must till the ground, that was clear ; 
and there came along Luke Stokes, the Governor of 
Nevis, intrigued by the stories of the new conquest ; 
he brought with him 1600 people, men, women, 
children, and slaves, to settle in the eastern part of 
the colony round Port Morant on the site of an old 
Spanish hato. The Jamaican Government hoped 
much from these new importations. 

Nevis is a tiny mountain island only fifty square 
miles in extent, and the people who came from there 
came to work and were accustomed to the isolation 
that is the lot of the pioneer. They settled in a 
part fertile certainly, with a wonderful and amazing 
fertility, but where the rainfall was very heavy and 
the heat far greater than in little Nevis, where the sea 
breeze swept every corner. There were mosquitoes 
too in the swamps, and a number of those settlers 
died, men, women, children, and slaves. Governor 
Stokes had hardly built himself a house when he 
and his wife died. If it was lonely in Nevis, ringed 
by the eternal sea, it was lonelier far in Port Morant, 
Jamaica, with the swamps around and the mountains, 
beautiful but stern and inaccessible, frowning down 
upon them. 

We know very little about those first comers, but 
we do know that after the first decimating sickness 
that fell upon them, the remainder held on and tried 
to make good. 

There were in 1671, the historian Long tells us, 
sixty settlements in the Port Morant district. 



36 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

Probably we should read for the word " settlements " 
"estates," either pens or sugar estates. Now to 
people who do not understand conditions in Jamaica 
that sounds quite thickly populated. But Jamaica 
is all hills and valleys — rather I should say, steep 
precipices and deep ravines — and, as I cannot say too 
often, especially in that district the vegetation is 
dense. A mile in Jamaica, it often seemed to me, 
is farther than ten in England, much farther than 
a hundred in Australia. Even now many pens, many 
sugar estates are cut off entirely from neighbours. 
I lived for three months a guest of hospitable 
Miss Maxwell Hall, at her house Kempshot, on 
top of a steep mountain, from which we could see 
literally hundreds of hills melting away into the dim 
distance. We could see Montego Bay 1800 feet 
below us, but no other habitation of a white man 
was in sight, and we were so cut off by the inaccessi- 
bility of the country that though my hostess is 
certainly one of the most charming and popular 
young women in the countryside, no one from the 
town ever made their way up that steep hill. They 
were content that she who knew the road should 
come down and see them when she had the time. 

When we talk about the colonising of Jamaica, 
I think we ought to take into consideration the 
isolation that was of necessity the lot of almost every 
colonist. 

And I think we may count these men from Nevis 
the very first agriculturists who did make good, and 
find a living in the soil of an island that is certainly 
one of the assets of the Empire. I am lost in 
admiration of these pioneers. They lived to them- 
selves, they were entirely dependent upon themselves. 
Were they sick ? They must see things through, die, 
or get well. As the crow flies, help might be near 



LOOP-HOLED FOR DEFENCE 37 

enough, but the steep mountain paths were cut by 
impassable torrents or blocked by dense vegetation. 
Their slaves might rise — probably they did — for slavery 
either for the white man or the black is not conducive 
to contentment, and they had to face it and bring 
them to a sense of their wrongdoing without outside 
aid. And then there was that other danger from the 
corsairs or pirates who swept the seas and made 
descents upon the lonely plantations, looking for 
meat, or rum, sometimes for women, and always for 
any trifles in gold or silver or jewels that might be 
picked up, and they were as ruthless as a Sinn Feiner 
in their methods. No wonder the houses were built 
stern and strong with thick walls loop-holed for 
defence. They might reckon on the slaves to help 
them here, for the slaves would not have much to 
hope for if they fell into the hands of the pirates. 
A slave's lot was probably hard enough anyway, but 
I think it was perhaps better to belong to a settler, 
to whom his services were of value, than to a pirate 
who evidently in those days counted a man's life 
about on a par with that of a beetle. They must 
have been a narrow, capable, self-centred people 
those settlers who came from Nevis and made good 
at Port Morant. 

Cromwell was very anxious that the island should 
be peopled and both he and Charles II. gave patents 
for land freely, and though there does not seem to 
have been much competition for these patents, still 
some men did come and were planted over the 
colony. 

The need of the island, of course, was women. 
Some of the old Spanish settlers gave in their sub- 
mission and they probably had daughters and young 
sisters to be wooed by the rough English soldiery. 
I don't know if any of those who took out patents 

D 



38 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

married in this way. Probably they did, especially in 
the north, but sometimes they brought their wives 
from the Old Country. 

At Little River in 1670 the lands were surveyed 
by Richard and Mary Rutledge, and other people took 
to themselves parcels of land there, varying in size 
from 50 to 200 acres. It is a rich country, this island 
that the Spaniards held so long, with rivers running 
down from the wooded mountains and in the rich 
river-bottoms almost any tropical plant will grow. 
The farther I went to the north-west the more fertile 
I found the country, and at Lucea, Lucea with the 
lovely little harbour well sheltered from storms, they 
grow yams, yams that are a byword in a land that 
will always grow yams. All along the road by the 
sea, that lovely road, came creaking great carts drawn 
by oxen — yes, even in these days of motors, bullock 
drays driven by shouting black drivers, piled high 
with Lucea yams. Yam, I may interpolate, is a 
valuable foodstuff. I want butter and milk to it, 
but the natives, the Creole descendants of the slaves, 
eat it with coconut oil. The food values of the yam 
and the potato — the Irish potato, as they quaintly 
call it in Jamaica — are probably about the same, but 
you get a great deal more for your money in a yam. 
It is the food of the common people, while the potato 
is a luxury. A black man once brought me, as a 
Christmas present, a cardboard box neatly tied up 
with pink ribbon, and in it wrapped up in white 
tissue paper were four " Irish " potatoes ! But even 
potatoes will grow in this goodly land — what will not 
grow here — I believe they cannot raise primroses — 
and yet these early settlers were not a success. 

"In the second generation," says the author of 
Old St James, "they had all died out or gone, and 
the only memorials were the graves." 



THE ULTRA ENGLISH 39 

They used to say in those days, and indeed long 
after, that unless the population were recruited from 
the Old Country every white would have gone in 
seven years. We may take that statement for what 
it is worth. The Briton, wanderer as he is, has a 
fixed idea in his own mind that the only place where 
children can really be reared properly is in those 
islands in the North Atlantic that he himself quitted 
in his youth. Even so late as when I was a young 
woman, I have heard battles royal on the subject 
of the degeneration of Australia, and there were men 
from England who held, and held strongly, that 
Australia cut off from Britain for ten years would 
degenerate into the savagery of the people the English 
had found there at the first settlement ! There was 
no stamina, said these ultra English, in young 
Australia, in young New Zealand ; even the animals 
became degenerate. But behold, over Australia's 
plains range the largest flocks of sheep in the world 
with the very best wool (at least it fetches the highest 
prices in London), and at Gallipoli the stalwart sons 
of Anzac proved once for all that they too were 
Britons, worthy sons of the Empire whose flag they 
were upholding. 

And so it is with Jamaica. Men can live, they 
can thrive there, but for the first comers, ingrained 
with British ideas, it was very hard indeed. 

We talk about planters, but I fancy some of those 
first comers were accustomed to live very humbly and 
had very small intellectual attainments. Of course 
there were the men of standing and their wives, 
the men who stood round the Governor, but the 
men who took out the patents for small parcels of 
land and lived on their land were probably hardly 
the equals of the Council School educated labourer 
of to-day. The only difference would be — and of 



40 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

course it is a tremendous difference — those planters, 
however small their educational attainments, were 
accustomed to look upon themselves as the salt of the 
earth. 

Each and all had slaves, and the gulf between the 
slave and his owner was so wide and so deep that 
there was no bridging it. It remains to-day in the 
colour question that is for ever cropping up, and 
it made one class arrogant as it made the other 
cringingly submissive. 

"If an average planter of 1720," says Planter's 
Punch, "and his wife and daughters could be brought 
back to life and could live for a day now as they lived 
in times long passed, and if we could witness their 
manners and have a glimpse of their daily customs, 
it is little to say that we should be inexpressibly 
shocked. . . . There is a planter's house of the first 
century of colonisation still standing in St Elizabeth, 
but there are scarce a dozen in the colony. It has a 
broad verandah in front, which you approach by a 
low flight of stone steps, the walls are from 2 to 
3 feet thick, there are shutters for the windows, you 
see at once that the place was originally built for 
defence. It is of one storey only ; there is no ceiling ; 
so that the heavy rafters are exposed. It may 
contain in all some six apartments ; it would not be 
disturbed by a hurricane, hardly by an earthquake, 
and it could have withstood for sometime an assault 
from slaves, ... It Was in houses of this sort that 
the country planter lived for a hundred years or more 
in those fabled ' good old times ' of which we some- 
times speak." 

And these houses were naturally very plainly 
furnished. There were great mahogany beds, one 
probably even in the sitting-room if the posts 
happened to be well carved, there were mahogany 



A PLANTER OF THE EARLY DAYS 41 

chairs and tables, perhaps a cupboard or great box 
or two, all made on the estate, for they all prided 
themselves upon having a carpenter. They had 
mattresses and quilts and of necessity mosquito 
curtains, but they had no pictures — the days of the 
pictorial calendar were not yet — and never a book, 
save perhaps the Family Bible, wherein to record 
the births and deaths of the family. If the house 
mistress were house proud, having as many servants 
as she pleased, she perhaps saw to it that her 
mahogany floors were kept in a high state of polish 
and the pieces of family silver brought from the 
Old Country and set out on the country-made side- 
board reflected the faces of its owners, but otherwise 
there was not much ornament. 

The weather was hot, it was always hot to these 
men from England, and at first they wore their 
heavy English clothes, their long coats, their waist- 
coats, their breeches and heavy woollen stockings ; 
and their hair too was long until they took to 
wearing wigs, which must have been worse. Well, 
of course, it was utterly out of the question that 
a man should go clad like that in a Jamaican August 
even when the rain came down in torrents and 
every leaf held a shower of water. He shed his 
clothes by degrees, and went about his house, where 
he was only seen by his women, often about his 
fields, where he was only seen by his slaves, who 
did not count, in thread stockings, linen drawers 
and vest, with a large handkerchief tied round his 
head. Out of doors he would wear a hat on top 
of this kerchief. Of course there were occasions 
when he graced some state function with his presence, 
or twice or thrice in his life on some very important 
occasion he may have felt impelled to attend church, 
and then he would adorn his head with a wig. 



42 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

Then, too, he would blossom out into a silk coat and 
a vest trimmed with silver. 

Lesley, speaking of his arrival in Jamaica in the 
beginning of the eighteenth century says, "the people 
seem all sickly, their complexion is muddy, their 
colour wan and their bodies meagre, they look like 
so many corpses and their dress resembles a shroud." 

It must be remembered that yellow fever was 
rampant, and that not till the very end of the 
nineteenth century was the cause known. "How- 
ever," he goes on to say, "they are frank and 
good-humoured and make the best of life they can. 
If Death is more busy in this place than in many 
others, his approach is nowhere received with a greater 
unconcernedness. They live well, enjoy their friends, 
drink heartily, make money, and are quite careless 
of futurity." 

I suppose he meant the Future Life, that life 
beyond the Grave, of which we know nothing ; but 
it seems to me it was the present that those past 
colonists played with so lightly. Many of the 
gentlemen were very fine and treated their inferiors 
— those with less of this world's goods — with a 
condescension that then was the admiration of their 
historian, but which nowadays would make us smile. 
One and all, it seems, however small reason they 
had for it, were very haughty and insisted upon 
being bowed down to. If a man wished to do 
business with them he might get much more favour- 
able terms if he knew how to "apply to their 
humour; but they who are so unhappy as to 
mistake it, may look for business in another place." 

It is very difficult for us to understand the 
feelings of the people of those times. Only after 
reading Mr and Mrs Hammond's books on Labour 
in England between 1760 and 1830, have I dimly 



"YOUNG MASTER* 43 

understood what the poor in those times suffered, 
what it was that filled the ships that brought bonds- 
men to the plantations in the West and later convicts 
to the colonies of the unknown South. 

Meditate on this description of the upbringing 
of a boy in Jamaica and think what it was to trust 
men's lives in such hands. 

"A boy till the age of seven or eight diverts 
himself with the negroes, acquires their broken way 
of talking, their manner of behaviour, and all the 
vices which these unthinking creatures can teach. 
Then perhaps he goes to school. But young Master 
must not be corrected. If he learns 'tis well, if not, it 
can't be helped. After a little knowledge of reading 
he goes to the dancing school and commences Beau, 
learns the common topics of discourse and visits 
and rakes with his equals. This is their method." 

Here is a little bill presented at a first-rate tavern 
in Kingston in the year 1716 which throws a little 
light on the way in which one of these beaus dined. 
A bit, I may say, seems to have been about 7^d. 



Dinner for one 


5 Bits 


Small beer 


1 Bit 


Bottle of ale 


4 Bits 


Quart of Rum punch 


• 4 „ 


Coffee 


1 „ 


Lodging 


8 „ 



23 Bits 



The bill does not mention how the gentleman 
got to his bed, but I presume he was carried there, 
or maybe he slept undisturbed under the table for 
which they charged him "lodging." 

In Lady Nugent's time, over eighty years later, 
she says: "I am not astonished at the general ill- 
health of the men in this country, for they really 



44 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

eat like cormorants and drink like porpoises. . . . 
Almost every man of the party was drunk, even to a 
boy of fifteen or sixteen, who was obliged to be carried 
home. His father was very angry, but he had no 
right to be so as he set the example to him." 

Surely there must be something very good in 
human nature, for we know there were fine men in 
past times. Evidently in spite of their upbringing. 

Life for the women was little better. If Madam 
could read and write it was as much as she could 
do. Whatever might have been the opinion of 
society in the Elizabethan era, undoubtedly, until 
but quite a few years ago, a learned woman was 
looked upon askance, and a gentleman — how the 
word is going out of use — ever feared that he might 
be thought to be in any way connected with trade. 
Even I can remember my grandmother saying to 
me that no gentleman wished to write a clear hand 
lest people should think he had been a clerk, and 
as for a woman very little reading and writing was 
good enough for her. Eeading she regarded as 
" waste of time " for a woman, and my grandmother 
was born in the end of the eighteenth century and 
died an old, old woman in the last quarter of the 
nineteenth. She prided herself — with justice— on 
her courtly manners, and like one of Jane Austen's 
heroines, was a lady of leisure, never did I see her 
doing anything. She must have worked, for she 
was a poor woman and her house was nicely kept, 
but it would have been derogatory to allow even 
her granddaughter to see her sweeping or dusting, 
or cooking or washing up the crockery. I fear the 
ladies of the planters and their daughters had less 
education than even my grandmother would have 
thought necessary and the courtly manners were 
left out. 



RUINED LIVES 45 

If young Master made free with the better-looking 
negro wenches, or, as time went on, with the mulattoes 
and quadroons, it made life exceedingly dull for his 
sisters and his neighbours' sisters. Nay, more, it 
absolutely ruined their lives, and it was a cross they 
must bear with a smile, pretend indeed that it was 
a thing to which they never gave a thought. Yet 
these girls were brought up to think that marriage 
was the be-all and end-all of a woman's life. It 
was, of course. Nowadays, when most careers are 
open to her, it is hard on a girl if she may not 
have the hope of marrying, and she may marry 
any time between twenty and forty. But if she 
does not marry, she may still have an important 
place in the world. Then if she did not marry 
young she was at once counted a nonentity, she 
had little chance of marrying at all, her life must 
needs be empty and she had no standing in the 
world. 

And maturity comes so quickly in the tropics. 
Her time was so woefully short. Shorter than it 
was in the Old Country, and it was short enough 
there. "She had passed her first bloom," writes 
Jane Austen on one occasion — and she meant it 
always — "she was nearly twenty." If she had not 
a beau by the time she was sixteen, or were not 
married by eighteen or nineteen, a girl was branded 
as a failure, and I think there must have been many 
heart-burnings among the white women of Jamaica 
in these long ago days. The twentieth century has 
given women better fortune, taken away the bitterness 
that is the portion of the woman who, being as it 
were on show, is passed by as worthless. 

But in the early days, because work was the 
portion of the slave, the lady must needs sit with 
idle hands. The long hot hours were interminable. 



46 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

She lounged about in a loose white garment, bare- 
headed, barefooted, she did absolutely nothing from J; 
morning to night. The slaves brought in food, 
highly-spiced food, to tempt a languid appetite, and 
she ate it on the floor, because so it was considered k 
more appetising ; if she felt amiable she asked the i 
slaves to share, if not, a blow or many stripes was [ 
their portion. Only when there was a chance of 
meeting a young man, or at least an unmarried 
man, did she give time and attention to her toilet 
and lay herself out to please. By reason of her 
training or lack of it, she had nothing in common 
with that man but thoughts of passion or pleasure. 
Of pleasure she might speak, though pleasure taken 
without work behind it, shared or understood, is 
very unmeaning ; of passion she was supposed to 
know not even the meaning of the word. She 
must, so she thought, appear utterly ignorant on 
most subjects. Many and many a time a girl put 
on her fine clothes, tried first this colour and then 
that, curled her hair and powdered her face, put |i 
a touch of rouge here and a patch there, pinned 
down a ribbon or fluffed out a bow and went out 
with a sigh and a smile and ogled and coquetted 
as might any more fortunate dame at Bath or 
Tunbridge Wells. 

And she hoped — for what? That perhaps at 
last she might find favour in some young buck's 
eyes, and so be able to talk to her sisters and her 
friends, and above all to her brothers, as if it 
were she who were conferring the favour and this 
young man had fallen a victim to her charms. 
When he came awooing in earnest he likely had, 
for the odds were heavy against her. Marriage 
was out of fashion. The young planter did not 
wish to marry. It was an age of so-called 



THE BURDEN OF THE WOMAN 47 

gallantry — of intrigue, and once the negro slaves 
were introduced, he formed connections with his 
own women slaves that gave him entire satisfaction. 

How often I wonder did the girl take off the 
gown put on with such high hopes with a bitter 
sense of failure, a failure that might not ever be 
put into words, and all the bitterer for that. And 
the oftener she did it, and the fainter her hopes, 
the more dreary would be her feelings. Her own 
helplessness, her own uselessness, though she would 
not put it that way, made her hard on the luckless 
girl who waited on her, made her curtail her 
scanty liberty, beat her, or starve her ruthlessly. 

But there were not always white women in a 
planter's household. Even now in Jamaica there 
is a proverb that says rudely that the two worst 
things on a pen are a goat and a white woman 
— that is what made these girls' chances so poor. 

Of course I am describing extreme cases. There 
were girls who were wooed and won, as there were 
women, I expect, who never neglected their toilet 
even when they were alone. But considering the 
climate, it was not unnatural they should pass the 
day in a dressing-gown which has been described 
as a sort of nightgown wrapped round them. In 
all the world there are born slatterns, and I can 
easily imagine the women of those first settlers 
drifting into very easy - going ways. In my own 
household we two women wakened at dawn and 
stood on the porch in our nightgowns wondering 
what the new day would bring. A nightgown 
and loose hair and bare feet seemed the proper 
costume. It is not too cool when the fresh morning 
air plays around you, it is quite enough when the 
heat of the day is upon you. Jamaica calls for 
some loose and airy costume. 



48 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

I have always been curious about the indentured 
white servants who were brought to the plantations 
in the West Indies and America to do the work 
of artisans and labourers, and I have been able to 
find little about them. 

The first were evidently those Irish sent out by 
Cromwell. And after that beginning almost every 
ship brought its quota of servants, as they called 
them, in contradistinction to the slaves. 

"Scarce a ship arrives," says Lesley, "but has 
passengers who design to settle, and servants for 
sale. This is a constant supply and a necessary one," 
meaning that they considered the white race must 
die out unless constantly renewed. Servants in those 
days were always aplenty. Sometimes these servants 
were convicts, sometimes they were only prisoners 
for debt, sometimes they were political prisoners, 
sometimes, I am afraid, they had been kidnapped, 
and sometimes like a well-known man, Sir William 
Morgan, they had sold themselves into slavery to 
get away from a life in England grown intolerable. 
That any men should have done so throws a sinister 
light on the life of many men in those times, for 
if the life of a negro slave was hard — and God 
knows it must have been — in no sense can it have 
approached the hardships of the lot of the white 
bondservant. 

"Another ship brought in a multitude of half- 
starved creatures," writes Lesley on another occasion, 
" that seemed like so many skeletons. Misery 
appeared in their looks, and one might read the 
effects of sea tyranny by their wild and dejected 
countenances. Tis horrid to relate the barbarities 
they complained of. A word or a wrong look was 
constru'd a design to Mutiny, and Hunger, Handcuffs 
and the Cat o' Nine Tails was immediately the 



A GOOD ARTISAN FOR £40 49 

punishment." True, he adds, "'tis only aboard a 
few vessels such cruelties are practised." 

When they arrived, they were not landed at once ; 
they must not leave the ship for at least ten days 
after she had entered the port. The master of the 
ship, merchant or importer of the white servants, had 
not the right to sell any before that time had elapsed 
under a penalty of £10 for every one so sold, 
and their keep was paid by the factor or seller. 
Why this was, I do not know. It might have been 
to give the most distant planters a chance to buy 
or it may have been in the interests of the servants 
themselves, so that any man who had been unlawfully 
smuggled aboard might have time in which to have 
his case investigated. Still, we may pity those poor 
bondsmen sweltering in their cramped quarters, but 
I suppose we may give the authorities credit for 
some little effort to do them justice. 

Once they were landed their hard lot had begun, 
a path which often led straight to the grave. 

There was always a shoal of buyers. Roystering 
Cavaliers and prim Roundheads crowded down to the 
ship and the servants passed before them and were 
examined, men and women, as if they had been so 
many horses or cattle. It must have been a bitter 
pill for the gentlemen of Monmouth's following, 
fallen from their high estate and passed from hand 
to hand by these men whom once they would have 
regarded as far below them, only -fit to sit at table 
with their servants, and bitterer still must it have 
been for the women. And though there was com- 
petition for them you might buy a good artisan for 
£40, an ordinary labourer for £20, and I am afraid 
the higher rank a man had held in England the lower 
would be his value in Jamaica, at least before negro 
slaves became numerous. 



50 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

Every servant had to serve according to contract, 
if there was no contract, for four years, but if he 
was under eighteen he had to serve seven years, and 
convicted felons, of course, for the time of their 
banishment. Fancy buying the services of a good 
carpenter for £10 a year and his keep ! It must 
have been cheap even when money was worth so 
much more. 

All authorities agree that these bondservants were 
cruelly ill-used. It was generally understood that 
while a man looked after his black slave, who was his 
for life, it was to his interest to get as much as he 
could out of his bondservant whose services were his 
only for a limited period. Thus it was that they were 
worked very hard indeed, so hard that often in sheer 
self-defence when the end of his time was approaching, 
a man would prevail upon his master to re-sell him 
for a further term of years to some other man. And 
often the servant died before the years were passed. 
I have found no record of what a woman brought, 
but I expect that Madam often commissioned her 
husband to bring her a quiet, middle-aged woman, not 
too good looking— though she probably didn't put 
it quite in those words — to tend the children and 
do the sewing. And the younger men, I expect, 
looked at the girls and suggested the propriety of 
a new waiting - maid to their fathers, or possibly, 
if they had houses of their own, bought them them- 
selves. Oh, I can see bitter depths of degradation that 
lay in wait for some of those younger bondwomen. 

One might think, considering how valuable was 
the worker, it would have been easy to escape and 
work as a- free labourer. But the authorities had 
provided for that. At the expiration of his time 
his master had to give the servant £2 and a certificate 
of freedom, and whoever employed any free person 



THE UNFORTUNATE BONDSMAN 51 

without a certificate from the last employer forfeited 
£10. Who then would take any risk when for so 
little more he could have a servant of right ? 

Each servant was to receive yearly three shirts, 
three pairs of drawers, three pairs of shoes, three 
pairs of stockings, and one hat or cap, little enough 
in a climate like Jamaica where the need is for plenty 
of clothes, washed often. The women were supplied 
proportionately. As a matter of fact the men often 
had no shoes, and were dressed, says Lesley, in a 
speckled shirt, a coarse Osnaburg frock (Osnaburg 
seems to have been a coarse sort of linen, something, 
I take it, like the dowlas of which we make kitchen 
towels), buttoned at the neck and wrists, and long 
trousers of the same, and they had bare feet unless 
they could contrive sandals. The women wore 
generally a striped Holland gown with a plain cloth 
wrapped about their heads, such as every negro maid 
wears nowadays. 

There were regulations for their feeding too. By 
these, each servant was to have 4 lbs. of good flesh 
or good fish weekly, and such convenient plantation 
provisions as might be sufficient. Most plantations 
had a "mountain" attached where the slaves grew 
their provisions, the cattle were turned out to recruit, 
and hogs were raised, and in a country like Jamaica 
there should have been no difficulty in supplying 
plenty of meat. But practically, I am afraid, it was 
not often supplied, and the 4 lbs. of -good flesh became 
Irish salt beef, which was admittedly very coarse, 
and as it had often been months on the way, was 
probably a great deal nastier than it sounds. 

The poor bondsman found himself hemmed in by 
all manner of regulations. No one could trade with 
a servant — or slave for that matter — without the 
consent of the master on penalty of forfeiting treble 



52 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

the value of the thing traded and £10 in addition. 
Human nature was frail, and if a freeman got a 
woman servant with child he had to pay £20 for the 
maintenance of the woman and child or serve the 
master double the time the woman was to serve. 
If he married her though, lucky woman, after he had 
paid that £20 she was free ; if they married without 
the master's consent the man had to serve two years. 

True, he had some privileges this luckless bond- 
servant. He could not be whipped on the naked back 
without the order of a justice of the peace under 
a penalty of £5 ; less, you see, than a man had to pay 
for trading with him without the consent of his 
master. And sometimes, of course, he was a favourite ; 
Lesley says he has known servants to dine " on the 
same victuals as their master, wear as good clothes, 
be allowed a horse and a negro boy to attend them." 
But to me this only emphasises how much the 
unfortunate servant was dependent for his comfort, 
his happiness, his success in life, not upon his worth 
but upon the caprice of the fine gentleman who was 
his master. If he were " stupid or roguish " he was 
hardly used, often put in the stocks and beaten 
severely, and he got nothing to eat but the salt 
provisions and the ground food the law insisted he 
should have, and at the end of his four years naturally, 
if his master would not give him a character, nobody 
could be found to employ him. His lot was worse 
than that of the black slave, whom custom and public 
opinion decreed should not be cast off in his old age 
whatever his record. 

How low was the status of a bond-servant is told 
by a chance remark of Lesley's, who says that Sir 
Henry Morgan was at first only a servant to a 
planter in Barbadoes, and " though that state of life 
be the meanest and most disgraceful, yet he caused 



THE PRIDE OF SIR HENRY MORGAN 53 

to be painted round his portrait a chain and pot- 
hooks, that marked the punishment to which he was 
like to be subjected in those days." 

That little story made me change my opinion 
of Sir Henry Morgan. He climbed by piracy, and 
then he put down piracy with a high hand, hanging 
the less fortunate of his fellows. But since he was 
not too proud to be reminded of the lowly position 
from which he had sprung, there must have been 
reason in what he did. 

The colony desired bond - servants or, more 
probably, white inhabitants. Any shipmaster import- 
ing fifty white servants was freed from port charges 
on the ship for that voyage, but they had, observe, 
to be male servants. They didn't think much of 
women in the days of gallantry. 

And others were welcome besides servants. 
"All tradesmen and others not able to pay their 
passages, except Jews, cripples, and children under 
eleven years of age, willing to transport themselves 
to this island shall be received on board any ship, 
and were free from any servitude." The master 
received for anyone coming from England, £7, 10s. ; 
from Ireland, £6 ; from New England, Carolina, and 
other parts of America, £3, 10s. ; from Providence 
and the "Windward Isles, £2. These sums were 
evidently paid to the shipowner through the master, 
for Lesley goes on to say that, for every person 
brought from Europe, the master "should have for 
his encouragement and to his own use the further 
sum of £1 per head, while those brought from 
America brought the master in 10s. ahead apiece." 
And evidently these willing emigrants were set to 
work at once, for all rogues and vagabonds and 
idle persons refusing to work were to be whipped 
on the naked back with thirty-nine lashes, when 

E 



54 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

presumably they took their place among the bond- 
servants. 

It wasn't very easy to get out of this country that 
was so lavish with its invitations to come and settle. 
Every shipmaster had to give security of £1000 not 
to carry off any person without leave of the Governor, 
and anyone wishing to get leave had his name set 
up for twenty-one days, and had to bring a witness 
who had known him or her for at least a year. It 
was even difficult to hide, for if a servant or hired 
labourer hid another man's servant or slave, he 
forfeited one year's service to the master or had 
thirty-nine lashes on the bare back. 

And that is all I can find about these unwilling 
immigrants. Not one person that ever I heard of 
owns to having descended from them, and what is 
more extraordinary still, tradition does not point at 
any man as having among his forebears one who 
so arrived in the colony. All trace of them is lost. 
Naturally, perhaps. No one owns to a convict 
grandfather or great grandfather, even if the con- 
viction were only for knocking down a rabbit. 

Still, in after years, no one would have been 
ashamed at having a follower of Monmouth for an 
ancestor. But I have heard of none such. If these 
bond-servants died they were forgotten, and if they 
made good, as some must have done, they were 
absorbed into the population. 

As the black slaves became commoner the value 
of the white bondsmen was enhanced, for the slaves 
were always a menace, and there was a law by which 
every owner of slaves had to keep one white man, 
servant, overseer, or hired man, for the first five 
working slaves ; for ten slaves, two whites, and two 
whites for every ten more, and these had to be 
resident on the plantation, so that these bondsmen 



THE STANDING OF THE BONDSMAN 55 

became either overseers or book-keepers, if they had 
not skill enough to be blacksmiths or carpenters. 
And then, I think, it was that the bondsman had 
his chance. 

Book-keepers or artisans were not supposed, 
even when they were free men, to speak to the 
planter's daughter. Their social standing was by 
no means good enough, and it was a time when class 
differences were very marked. 

But youth is youth, and if the girl had no hope 
of a lover among her own class, and indeed even if 
she had, I expect the good looking young bondsman 
was often encouraged by an arch look or a melting 
glance to a closer acquaintance. It ended — well in 
one way. She ran away with him, or possibly there 
was nowhere to run to, and a man cannot go far 
without money, so — the tropical nights are made for 
love-making. Presently, if the father and the mother 
were not wise, there was a scandal and some poor 
servant had ill-merited stripes. 

But sometimes, I think, the planter was wise. 
Quite likely the bondsman, especially if he had been 
a political prisoner, was far better educated and 
better mannered than the girl running wild on the 
estate. Some provision would be made for the 
young couple, the lad would get his freedom, and 
in some house a little more sequestered in the hills, 
they would start housekeeping with a cane patch and 
black servants of their own. 

This is entirely my own idea. I can find no 
record whatever of such a marriage. All trace of 
the bond-servants has vanished as completely as 
though they had never been, but this is the way I 
interpret Lesley's remark, " At last for the most part 
run away with the most insignificant of their humble 
servants ! " 



56 THE WHITE BONDSMEN 

But that lucky man was only one out of hundreds. 

Many and many an unhappy being, I am afraid, 
crawled away from a servitude grown too hard, and 
died beneath the tangle of palms and tropical greenery 
among the mountains of Jamaica. 

For they died prematurely — we know they died. 
Even the ruling class died like flies often before they 
had reached their prime, and each and all set down 
the abnormal death rate to the pestilential climate. 
Really Jamaica has a beautiful climate, but they did 
not understand in those days the danger of the 
mosquito, and they thought the night air was deadly. 
All classes drank, the masters "Madera" and rum, 
and the servants rum that was doubtless not of the 
best, It is easy to sneer, but human nature needs 
some relaxation, and living on beef that was like 
brine, sleeping all night in a room from which the 
night air was carefully excluded, the gorgeous divine 
night of Jamaica, and overworked in the burning sun, 
we can hardly blame these bondsmen for drinking. 
They watered the cane pieces with their sweat and 
blood, and they died— died — died ! They were not 
even pioneers. They were simply bond-servants on 
whom no one wasted pity. 

It seems to me that pity, that true pity which is 
not half-sister to contempt, but has eyes for suffering 
humanity, and the will to better things was hardly 
born among the majority till after the Great War. 
Now at last is the worker coming into his own, and 
if he wax fat and kick like the gentleman in Holy 
Writ, I think we must forgive him, for long has he 
served. 



CHAPTEE III 

Jamaica's first historian 

It is fascinating to read up the old books that have 
been written about Jamaica. Wearisome sometimes 
naturally, because for one illuminating remark you 
must wade through a mass of turgid stuff. 

I confess even to having skipped occasionally 
Hans Sloane, and I read Hans Sloane^ — in the original 
edition with the long " s's " — sitting on the verandah 
of my house looking over the Caribbean Sea, and 
when I had finished I felt I had known him, so 
charming is he. I was sorry I could not write and 
thank him for his book. It is a very strange thing 
how personality creeps out in writing. No one 
surely ever talked less of himself than Hans Sloane, 
but we somehow get a picture of a kindly, interesting 
man, patient and tactful, whom it must have been a 
privilege to know, and he manages to give us a very 
clear picture of life in Jamaica little more than thirty 
years after the first landing of the English. He was 
Physician to the Duke of Albemarle and lived in 
Jamaica for a year, 1687-88, and he looked at the 
country he had come to with seeing eyes, and 
described thoughtfully what he saw. 

"The Swine come home every night in several 
hundreds from feeding on the wild Fruit in the 
neighbouring Woods, on the third sound of a Conch 
Shell, when they are fed with some few ears of Indian 



58 JAMAICA'S FIRST HISTORIAN 

corn thrown in amongst them, and let out the next 
morning not to return till night, or that they heard 
the sound of the Shell. These sort of remote Planta- 
tions are very profitable to their Masters, not only in 
feeding their own Families, but in affording them 
many Swine to sell for the Market. It was not a 
small Diversion to me, to see the Swine in the 
Woods, on the first sound of the Shell, which is 
like that of a Trumpet, to lift up their Heads from 
the ground where they were feeding and prick up 
their Ears to hearken for the second which so soon 
as ever they heard, they would begin to make some 
movements homewards, but on the third Sound they 
would run with all their Speed to the Place where 
the Overseer us'd to throw them Corn. They are 
called home so every night, and also when such of 
them as are fit for Market are wanted ; and seem to 
be as much, if not more, under Command and 
Discipline, than any Troops I ever saw. 

"A Palenque is here a place for bringing up of 
Poultry, as Turkeys, which here much exceed the 
European and are very good and well tasted, Hens, 
Ducks, Muscovy Ducks and some very few Geese. . . . 
These Poultry are all fed on Indian, or Guinea Corn 
and Ants nests brought from the Woods which 
these Fowls pick up and destroy mightily." 

This was written of 1687, but it is true now in 
this twentieth century. I have seen oranges and 
naseberries lying rotting under the trees in heaps 
and I know there is much waste land in Jamaica 
where it should be well worth someone's while to 
raise hogs and chickens and turkeys. Just behind 
where I am sitting writing, a bare two miles from 
the town of Montego Bay, there is a swamp which 
at present breeds nothing but large and fierce 
mosquitoes, but where hogs might live to their 



THE WEALTH OF THE LAND 59 

advantage and the swamp's, and in these days of 
cold storage and world shortage I wonder why that 
swamp is not turned to good account. As for fowls 
and turkeys and ducks, they grow fat and heavy, 
they lay wonderfully, and if anyone gave a little 
attention to the poultry industry they should coin 
money. Guinea-fowl will feed themselves, and so 
will the pea-fowl, the bird that used to be considered 
— rightly — a dish for a royal banquet. And 
nowadays, instead of being taken to market on mule- 
back or on the heads of slaves, they would quite 
well pay for motor cartage. 

I am sorry to say it seems to me this industry 
has rather retrograded since Sloane's day. 

"The Cattle," he says, "are penn'd every night 
or else they in a short time run wild. These Pens 
are made of Palisadoes and are look'd after very 
carefully by the Planters. The Oxen who have 
been drawing in their Mills and are well fed on 
Sugar Cane tops are reckoned the best meat, if not 
too much wrought. They are likewise fatted by 
Scotch Grass." 

They did escape many a time from these " Pali- 
sadoes" and so the woods of Jamaica proved very 
attractive hunting-grounds for the buccaneers. It 
is evident that pork and beef might be got here 
quite as easily as in the days of the Spaniards, and 
perhaps it was in return for this unwilling hospitality 
that these gentlemen brought much of their plunder 
to Port Royal, for Jamaica, in those first years, even 
before Sir Hans Sloane wandered about it, made 
money out of the corsairs. They were a difficult 
problem. Other days, other manners. They ravaged 
the coasts yet they brought wealth to the capital, 
and while some of them got themselves hanged for 
the blackguards they undoubtedly were, Sir Henry 



6 JAMAICA'S FIRST HISTORIAN 

Morgan, the successful English leader of the lot, 
was at one time Lieutenant-Governor of the island. 

It was no wonder Jamaica attracted all sorts and 
conditions of adventurers, for the climate, if one 
remembers it lies within the tropics, is lovely. It 
is hot in the middle of the day and the sun has 
naturally great power, but there is from ten in the 
morning till four in the afternoon a cooling breeze 
off the sea, and at night it is reversed, the cool 
breeze comes from the land. Hans Sloane notices 
this, he also mentions what of course is of no 
consequence in these days of steamers, that no ship 
can come into harbour save in the middle of the 
day, and none can go out save in the early morning 
or at night. He kept a record of the weather all 
the time he was in the island, and that record for 
1687-88 might have done almost word for word for 
1919-20, so little does the climate vary. His 
memorandum for the 25th October 1688 might have 
stood for the 25th October 1920, when I read it, 
"Fair weather with a small sea breeze." And when 
the sea breeze has failed he has a note which I 
feelingly record is perfectly true, "Extream hot." 
Luckily the sea breeze seldom fails, and I suppose 
there is no place in the world where the climate 
suits everyone always. Sloane remarks that most 
people considered the land breeze at night unwhole- 
some, "which," he says, with a wisdom beyond his 
time, "I do not believe," and even to-day I have 
met people who warned me gravely against the 
danger of sleeping outside. "The damp night wind 
is so dangerous ! " and like Sloane I did not believe 
and I went on sleeping in the open and daily growing 
better and better. 

As a physician, he had a great deal to say about 
the health of the people of the new Colony. Indeed, 



CONDUCT AND CLIMATE 61 

reading him has made me understand how slowly 
and imperceptibly we throw off the old and take 
up the new. He dilates on the immorality of the 
people. Not that he worried about their souls as 
did later writers ; he takes things as he finds them 
and does not expect men to be impossible — and 
dull — angels, but he writes wisely on the effect such 
conduct must have on the individual. 

"The Passions of the Mind have very great 
power on Mankind here, especially Hysterical Women 
and Hypochondriacal Men. These cannot but have 
a great share in the cause of several Diseases, some 
of the People living here being in such Circumstances, 
as not to be able to live easily elsewhere : add to 
this that there are not wanting some, as everywhere 
else, who have been of bad Lives, whereby their 
minds are disturbed, and their Diseases, if not 
rendered Mortal, yet much worse to cure than those 
who have sedate Minds, and Clear Consciences. On 
the same account it is that those who have not their 
Wills, Minds, and Affairs settled, in Distempers are 
much worse to be cur'd than other Men." And he 
goes on to say that he considers many of the ailments 
of the people may be set down to "Debauchery" 
and their love of drinking. The Europeans, he says, 
are foolish to dress in the tropics as they would at 
home, and he tells how, going for a ride in the early 
morning, his periwig and " Cloths " were wet with 
dew. 

This shrewd observer prescribes the most drastic 
remedies. 

One good lady, who was going blind, he ordered 
to take "Millepedes alive, to one hundred in a 
morning, rising to that number by degrees, on the 
days when she took nothing else. By these means 
persisted in she first felt some relief, by degrees 



62 JAMAICAN FIRST HISTORIAN 

recovered the sight of one Eye and then of the 
other, so that she could at last read Bibles of the 
smallest print, and was entirely cured." I am glad 
of that, for she had been bled by cupping, by scarifica- 
tion in the shoulders, blistered in the neck, and had 
had various other extremely disagreeable things done 
to her. But I hardly give the "Millepedes" credit, 
perhaps it was the abstinence from the many good 
things that came her way. 

He certainly makes diverting reading on the 
people who came to him with various ailments, 
though I doubt whether his patients found anything 
particularly amusing in his treatment of them. He 
carefully sorts them all out according to their rank, 
for people were much more punctilious then than 
now. He mentions "Loveney, a negro woman of 
Colonel Ballard's," "one Barret," "a lusty woman," 
"one Cornwall's daughter," "a Gentleman aged about 
40 years," " a young Gentlewoman aged about twelve 
years." And he is extremely frank as to their 
ailments and their causes. Of a "Gentlewoman 
aged about fifty years," he writes, "I attribute this 
disease to Wine Punch and Vinous Liquors, but she 
would not abstain, alledging that her Stomach was 
cold and needed something to warm it." We some- 
times hear that statement in these days ! 

Again he tells us of a gentleman who in drinking 
"Madera Wine and Water, he made use of it too 
often, whereby he became usually, the more he drank, 
the more dry, so that after a small time he was 
necessitated to drink again." I think we also meet 
cases like that not infrequently. Sloane himself 
considers that water is the best drink, though he 
did not always practise what he preached, but his 
really lightning cure was that of that "lusty negro 
Footman Emanuel. Emanuel was ordered over-night 



"POOR EMMANUEL 1 ' 63 

to get himself ready against next morning to be a 
guide on foot for about an hundred miles through the 
Woods to a place of the island to seize Pirates who, 
as the Duke of Albemarle was informed, had there 
unladed great quantities of Silver to Careen their 
Ship." Now Emanuel had evidently heard all about 
the pirates, and did not desire a closer acquaintance, 
and I have the sincerest sympathy with Emanuel. 
"About twelve a'Clock in the night he pretended 
himself to be extraordinary sick, he lay straight 
along, would not speak, and dissembled himself in 
great Agony by groaning, etc." But, alas, he had the 
cleverest doctor in the island to deal with. "His 
pulse beat well, neither had he any foaming at the 
mouth or difficulty in breathing. The Europeans 
who stood by thought him dead, Blacks thought him 
bewitched, and others were of opinion that he was 
poyson'd. I examined matters as nicely as I could, 
concluded that this was a new strange Disease such 
as I had never seen, or was not mention'd by any 
Authority I had read, or that he counterfeited it." 

Poor Emanuel ! 

" Being confirmed that it was this latter, and that 
he could speak very well if he pleas'd, to frighten 
him out of it, I told the Standers by, that in such a 
desperate condition as this, 'twas usual to apply a 
Frying pan with burning Coals to the Head, in order 
to awake them thoroughly, and to draw from the 
Head, and that it was likewise an ordinary method 
to put Candles lighted to their Hands and Feet, 
that when the flame came to burn them they might 
be awaked. I sent two several People in all haste to 
get ready these things, in the meantime leaving him, 
that he might have time to consider and recover out 
of this fit of Dissumlation, which in a quarter of an 
hour he did, so that he came to speak. I question'd 



64 JAMAICA'S FIRST HISTORIAN 

him about his pain, he told me it was very great in 
his Back. I told him in short that he was a dis- 
sembler, bid him go and do his business without any 
more ado, or else he should have due Correction, 
which was the best Remedy I knew for him, he 
went about his Errand immediately and perform'd 
it well, though he came too late for the Pirats." 
I expect Emanuel knew a thing or two, and since 
the leading of the expedition was in his hands, very 
naturally saw to it that they did not come upon them 
too soon. 

Sloane was not content to stay in Port Royal or 
at Spanish Town, which was the seat of the Govern- 
ment, but wandered about the island. At St Ann's, 
on Captain Hemmings' plantation, he found the ruins 
of Sevilla, the town the Spaniards built as their first 
capital. Whether he looked at those ruins with the 
eyes of a romance writer, I do not know. Certainly 
he seems to have found them much more magnificent 
than any other Spanish remains found warrant us in 
thinking them. He found a fort, a monastery, sugar 
works, and Captain Hemmings told him he often 
found pavements 3 feet deep under big canes. There 
were the ruins of several buildings not yet finished, 
and tradition said that the Europeans had been cut 
off by the Indians. The town had been overgrown 
for a long time, and he says most of the timber felled 
off this place, within the walls of the tower, was 60 feet 
long. " The West Gate of the Church was very fine 
Work and stands very entire, it was seven Foot wide, 
and as high before the Arch began. Over the door 
in the middle was our Saviour's head with a Crown 
of Thorns, between two Angels, on the right side a 
small round figure of some Saint with a Knife stuck 
into his Head, on the left a Virgin Mary or Madonna, 
her Arm tied in three places Spanish Fashion." 



CATTLE IN THE WOODS 65 

That pathetic, uncompleted old church at Sevilla, 
with the arched stones that lay about among the 
canes but had never been put up, tells a story of 
terror of the old days. But the English soldiery, 
contemptuous of all things Spanish, swept everything 
away, and I do not suppose that one of those stones 
he saw in Captain Hemmings' fields yet remains. 
All went long years ago. 

Colonel Ballard told him that when the Spaniards 
left the island they abandoned not only their slaves 
but their dogs, great beasts as big as Irish grey- 
hounds. These went wild and hunted of themselves 
the cattle that were in the savannahs and woods. 
Apparently these capable dogs had been used by 
their masters to hunt the Indians, for there was 
always a certain share of the booty on these occasions 
due to the master of the dogs. There were wild horses 
too in the woods, and the English settlers took the best 
and destroyed them, using them ruthlessly in the mills. 
Man has ever been cruel to the luckless beasts that 
fell into his hands. And Sloane remarks how smooth 
were the skins of these horses in comparison with 
the rough coated little horses introduced by the 
conquerors from New England. There were cattle 
too and the settlers as well as the buccaneers hunted 
these, killing them apparently rather wantonly, but 
probably there was not much else for the soldiers 
to feed on. "This way of taking the wild black 
Cattle," says Sloane, "cutting their tendons or 
Lancing is what is used by the Spaniards in their 
islands and Continents, and by Privateers and 
Bucaniers ; but in Jamaica there remain very few 
wild Cattle to be taken and those are in the 
Northside of the Island in the less frequented parts. 
The manner in which the Spaniards and English 
killed these Cattle, besides the wild Dogs who used 



66 JAMAICANS FIRST HISTORIAN 

of themselves to hunt and kill them, was with a 
Lance or Halberd, on the end of which was an Iron 
sharpened and made in the shape of a Crescent or 
Half Moon. These wild Cattle are said much to 
exceed the others in taste." 

He tells too of the slaves, for negro slaves they 
had in those days as well as Indians and indentured 
white servants. " The Indians are not the natives of 
the island, they being destroyed by the Spaniards, 
but are usually brought by surprise from the 
Mosquitoes or Florida" (what blackguards were 
these old colonists) " or such as were slaves to the 
Spaniards and taken from them by the English. . . . 
They are of an olive colour, have long black lank 
hair, and are very good Hunters, Fishers, or Fowlers, 
but are naught at working in the Fields or Slavish 
Work, and if checkt or drub'd are good for nothing, 
therefore are very gently treated and well fed." . . . 
"Of the Negros . . . those who are Creolians, born 
in the island, or taken from the Spaniards, are 
reckoned worth more than the others in that they 
are seasoned to the Island." 

Seasoned to the Island, indeed ! He means 
their troubles there were the devil, they knew. 
And then he goes on to show us what these troubles 
might be. "The punishments for Crimes of Slaves 
are usually for rebellion by burning them, by nailing 
them down to the ground with crooked Sticks on 
every Limb and then applying the Fire by degrees 
from the Feet and Hands, burning them gradually 
up to the head whereby their Pains are extravagant. 
For Crimes of a lesser nature, Gelding, or chopping 
off Half the Foot with an Ax. Their Punishments 
are suffered by them with great Constancy. 

" For running away they put Iron Pings of great 
weight on their Ankles, or Pottocks about their 



A VERY PERVERSE GENERATION 67 

necks, which are Iron Kings with two long Spikes 
rivetted to them or a Spur in the Mouth. 

"For Negligence they are usually whipt by the 
Overseers with Lancewood Switches till they be 
bloody, and several of the Switches broken, being 
first tied up by their Hands in the Mill Houses. 
Beating with Manati Straps is thought too cruel, 
and therefore prohibited by the Customs of the 
Country. The Cicatrices are visible on their skins 
for ever after, and a slave, the more he have of those, 
is the less valu'd." So that was why it was pro- 
hibited to beat them with Manati Straps, for they do 
not otherwise appear to have been over-tender. 

"After they are whip'd till they are Raw some 
put on their Skins Pepper and Salt to make them 
smart ; at other times their Masters will drop melted 
Wax on their Skins and use several very exquisite 
Torments. These Punishments are sometimes merited 
by the Blacks, who are a very perverse Generation of 
People " (I remember that Miriam, my first waiting- 
maid, who wore her wool standing out in a series 
of little tails like a surprised night-mare, always 
considered the table laid when she had put on the 
carving knife, even though we proposed to eat eggs), 
"and though they appear Harsh" (harsh is hardly 
the term I should have used), "yet. are scarcely 
equal to some of their Crimes and inferior to what 
punishments other European nations inflict on their 
slaves in the East Indies." 

And we are left wondering what on earth the 
other nations could have done. 

But there was one safeguard, a feeble one it 
is true, but still in some cases I dare say it was 
efficacious. 

"There are many Negros sold to the Spaniards," 
he says, " who are either brought lately from Guinea, 



68 JAMAICA'S FIRST HISTORIAN 

or bad Servants or Mutinous in Plantations. They 
are sold to very good profit ; but if they have many 
Cicatrices or Scars on them, the marks of their severe 
Corrections, they are not very saleable. The English 
got in return Cacao, Sarsaparilla, Pearls, Emeralds, 
Cochineal, Hides, &c." 

So the thought of the pearls and emeralds they 
might be worth, perhaps saved many a poor slave 
from the cruel treatment that otherwise might have 
been his. 

" I saw in this harbour (Port Royal)," says Sloane 
on one occasion, "a ship come from the Guineas 
loaded with blacks to sell. The Ship was very nasty 
with so many people on board." 

"When a Guinea ship comes near to Jamaica 
with Blacks to sell," he goes on, " there is great care 
taken that the Negros should be shaved, trim'd, and 
their bodies and hair anointed all over with Palm Oil 
which adds great beauty to them. The Planters 
chose their Negros by their look and by the country 
from which they come. The Blacks from the East 
Indies " (what a cruel long way to come in a slave 
ship) "are fed on Flesh and Fish at home, and 
therefore are not coveted, because troublesome to 
nourish, and those from Angola run away from their 
Masters, and fancy on their deaths they are going 
home again, which is no lucriferous experiment, for 
on hard usage they kill themselves." No wonder, 
poor things, no wonder. And such were the times 
that kindly Hans Sloane merely remarks it is "no 
lucriferous experiment." 

He also remarks that the negroes and Indians 
used to bathe themselves in fair water every day as 
"often as conveniently they can." Which really 
sounds as if their masters did not. 

And he tells of treasure ships too, does Hans 



THE GREAT PLATE SHIP 69 

Sloane, treasure ships such as we have dreamed 
of when we were young. He tells us of Sir William 
Phipps who wrote an account of the first finding 
of the great Plate ship wrecked to the north-east of 
Hispaniola. He went with one Eogers master of 
a small ship to Porto Plata, and there they discharged 
three guns to get the Spaniards to trade. They 
came down, they were forbidden to trade with the 
English, I believe, and the English sold them "small 
Babies," "and Searges," and they got in exchange 
hides and jerked hogs taken by the hunters there. 
Meanwhile Rogers had his heart set on the wreck 
and was making enquiries about it. He actually 
went looking for it and discovered it by means of a 
"Sea Feather growing on the planks of the Ship 
lying under the water." Back he came with the 
good news, and Sir William Phipps joined him with 
another ship, and they set to work in businesslike 
fashion to possess themselves of that silver. The 
ship was a Spanish galleon, lost about the year 1659, 
bound to Spain, and it was near thirty years later 
that these Merchant Venturers turned it to good 
account. Their two ships were laden with trade goods 
in case they failed to find the ship, but having found 
it they set to work to clear away the coral and lapis 
astroites which had grown over it, and "they took 
up silver as the Weather and their Divers held out, 
some days more and some days less. The small 
Ship went near, the great one rode afar off." And 
they actually took out in bullion £22,196, "30,326 of 
which were Sows," says Sloane, "and great Bars, 
336." But it must have been pleasant standing on 
the deck of that small ship watching the sea-worn 
gold and silver that belonged of right to the 
Spaniards dumped on the planks. So the Venturers 
found it, for they stayed until the crews were short of 

F 



70 JAMAICA'S FIRST HISTORIAN 

provisions and they had brought up 26 tons of silver. 
Then a sloop from Bermuda came to their aid with 
foodstuffs, but the secret was out, and while the 
foodless ships sailed away for home laden with their 
booty that sloop went back to Bermuda and talked, 
and many sloops and divers were sent down and a 
vast quantity more of plate and money was taken up, 
so that when the second fleet came from England 
most of what was left of that rich find was dispersed 
among people who certainly had as good a right to it 
as the first comers. 

After that it became quite fashionable to take out 
patents to hunt for wrecks, and though Sloane says 
much money was made on that first wreck, much 
more was lost in the projects than ever was taken 
out of the sea. 

Evidently to Hans Sloane his expedition to 
Jamaica loomed large, for it was years after he left 
it that his last volume on the subject was published. 
That voyage must have been the event of a fairly 
full life. After the death of the Duke of Albemarle, 
who certainly seems to have been a shining example 
of how not to live in the tropics, Hans Sloane, 
in the train of the Duchess, left Jamaica on the 
16th March 1689, and did not arrive off the Lizard 
till the 29th May. How far off Jamaica was in 
those days we may judge when we are told that 
the fleet was afraid to go into Plymouth because 
they did not know whether England was at war 
or not. At last they picked up a fishing smack 
and heard that James II. had been deposed, that 
William III. reigned in his stead, and that the 
Channel was full of French privateers. 

Before I leave the subject of Jamaica's first 
historian, I must tell a strange story that was told 
me by a friend. He told his experience reluctantly, 



THE UNEXPLAINABLE 71 

he does not believe in the supernatural, and he is 
quite sure there must be some perfectly natural 
explanation of the incident could he but find it. 
There was something wrong with his knee and he 
was afraid he was going to be a cripple for life, 
for no doctor could find out what was wrong. He 
used to struggle from his bed on to a board and 
his servants carried him that way to a sofa, where 
he spent his daylight hours. So it went on from 
day to day and he had little hope of getting better. 
At night his black manservant slept on the floor 
close to his bed, so as to be near in case he should 
want any help. Naturally, being a young and active 
man and not given to books, he was much depressed 
at the outlook. 

One night as he lay in bed he wakened suddenly 
from his sleep with the feeling that somebody was 
in the room. For a moment he could see nothing, 
only hear the snores of the man on the floor. Then 
as he looked he saw the moonlight streaming through 
the open window, and right in its light stood a man, 
not anyone he knew, but a white man with a kindly 
face, his brown hair drawn back and tied behind 
with a ribbon, and his brown coat, knee-breeches, 
stockings and shoes those of other days. He 
said nothing, but, smiling quietly, came towards the 
bed and laying his hand on the injured leg began 
slowly stroking it up and down. It was infinitely 
soothing, and presently to his surprise my friend 
closed his eyes, and when he opened them again 
his strange visitor had gone. He felt strangely at 
ease and fell asleep. When he waked in the morning 
he rose up, and, discarding the board on which he 
had been carried, told everyone he was going to get 
well and would require it no more. And sure enough 
he never did. 



72 JAMAICAN FIRST HISTORIAN 

From that day he mended and now hardly knows 
which leg was bad. But instead of wondering, as 

1 should have done, whether the Duke of Albemarle's 
physician had visited him, he says, " Only fancy, I'm 
sure it was only fancy." He is not a reading man, 
and I don't think he has ever heard of Hans Sloane. 

But if I skipped some of Hans Sloane's two 
great volumes, I must confess to having raced through 
at a much faster rate many of the other books on 
early Jamaica. There is a novel called Marly, the 
scene of which is laid in the beginning of the last 
century, and so dull it is I can hardly believe it was 
presented to people for amusement If they had 
nothing else to read, it almost excuses the ignorance 
and easy-going ways of the planters and their 
families. Not that these regarded themselves as 
ignorant by any means. Uncultured as they were, 
they held themselves far above any of their depen- 
dents, though the ladies might, and often did, sit 
round the pepper pot with their black serving women, 
ate as they did, and talked as they did. Lady 
Nugent, the Governor's wife, between 1801 and 1805, 
found great difficulty in talking to them, and she, 
of course, met the best. 

"A party of ladies with me at the Penn," she 
writes, "and never was there anything so completely 
stupid. All I could get out of them was, 'Yes, 
ma'am,' 'No, ma'am,' with now and then a simper 
or a giggle. At last I set them to work stringing 
beads, which is now one of my occupations ; and I 
was heartily glad when their carriages came at 

2 o'clock." 

Of course Lady Nugent forgets that she was 
a very great lady, and that quite likely these wives 
and daughters of the planters were shy. They might 
have shown to greater advantage if she could have 



LADY NUGENT ON THE COLONIAL LADIES 73 

met them on equal terms. But she never did. She 
seems to have been a cheery soul, but I am afraid 
she was convinced she was made of very superior 
clay. She is always complaining that she finds 
" sad want of local matter or indeed any subject of 
conversation with them." The manner of their speech, 
too, was bad. 

" The Creole language," she says, "is not confined 
to the negroes. Many of the ladies who have not 
been educated in England speak a sort of broken 
English, with an indolent drawling out of their words 
that is very tiresome, if not disgusting. I stood next 
to a lady one night, next to a window, and by way 
of saying something remarked that the air was much 
cooler than usual, to which she answered, "Yes, 
ma'am, him railly too fra-ish." 

Probably we should be surprised could we 
reincarnate them to find these ladies giving them- 
selves all the airs of a grande dame, though they had 
less learning than any cook-maid nowadays, less than 
the little black boys and girls trotting along the steep 
and stony paths with slates on their heads to their 
daily school. But the lords and ladies of that time 
were hardly models of decorum. 

"I wish," goes on this gossipy good lady who 
is very sure of herself and her own position in 
the world, " I wish Lord Balcarres " (the Governor 
whose place General Nugent was taking) "would 
wash his hands and use a nail brush, for the black 
edges of his nails really make me sick. He has, 
besides, an extraordinary propensity to dip his 
fingers into every dish. Yesterday he absolutely 
helped himself to some fricassee with his dirty 
finger and thumb." And again, "We drove to Lord 
Balcarres' Penn. Never was such a scene of dirt 
and discomfort. Lord B. was in a sad fright, 



74 JAMAICA'S FIRST HISTORIAN 

thinking we should expect breakfast. However, 
upon his secretary's whispering to me that there 
was but one whole teacup and a saucer and a 
half, we declared our intention of returning to the 
King's House, where a party was waiting for us 
to breakfast." 

If that could be written of the King's repre- 
sentative of one of the premier colonies only thirty-five 
years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, 
what must we not forgive in the planters of a 
century earlier. 

Lady Nugent has a certain fearful joy in recount- 
ing the backslidings of the men of her day, which 
makes her most amusing reading, while it certainly 
throws a good deal of light on the manners and 
customs of her times. 

" The overseer, a vulgar Scotch officer on half 
pay, did the honours to us. ... I talked to the 
black women, who told me all their histories. The 
overseer's chere amie (and no man here is without 
one) is a tall black woman, well made, with a flat 
nose, thick lips and a skin of ebony, highly polished 
and shining. She showed me her three yellow 
children, and said with ostentation she would soon 
have another. . . . The marked attention of the 
other women plainly proved her to be the favourite 
Sultana of this vulgar, ugly Scotch Sultan." 

As a rule, of course, white ladies did not visit 
the house where a coloured woman was established. 
They probably giggled and sniggered, and talked in 
hushed voices into each other's ears, while the 
little girls looked innocent and had to pretend they 
did not understand, but Lady Nugent seems to 
have broken clown the unwritten law, perhaps like 
a King of old she was above all law. 

She tells a story of a slave addressing a Mr 



THE MORALS OF THE OLD PLANTERS 75 

Shirley, "a profligate character as far as I can 
understand." 

" ' Hi, Massa, you telly me marry one wife which 
is no good. You no tinky I see you buckra no 
content wid one, two, three, four wives, no more 
poor negro.' The overseers, too, are in general 
needy adventurers, without either principle, religion, 
or morality. Of course their example must be the 
worst possible to these poor creatures. . ." The 
smugness of Lady Nugent ! 

"A little mulatto girl sent into the drawing- 
room to amuse me," says she, writing of her visit 
to Mr Simon Taylor's, an old bachelor at Liguanea. 
"She was a sickly, delicate child, with straight 
light hair and very black eyes. Mr T. appeared 
very anxious for me to dismiss her, and in the 
evening the housekeeper told me she was his own 
daughter and lie had a numerous family, some 
almost on every one of his estates." 

When she left the gentlemen she took tea in 
her own room, surrounded by the black, brown, 
and yellow ladies of the house, and fairly revelled 
in gossip, this being the time, of course, when she 
heard of its master's peccadilloes. 

We smile at Lady Nugent, but after all she 
does succeed in giving us some idea of how the 
planters of Jamaica lived in her day, all the more 
so because she is unconscious of doing anything 
beyond telling the tale of her life and sufferings 
in a far land with what she regarded as a pestilential 
climate. But she by no means holds such a high 
place in my affections as Hans Sloane. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

Jamaica is a thickly populated country. The last 
census taken in 1911 gave a population of 197 to 
the square mile, and this is mostly black, for the 
same statistics give something under 16,000 white 
people to close on 800,000 black and coloured, and 
in all probability among the so-called white there 
would be a trace of colour. 

Now I was warned not to touch on the colour 
question when I wrote on Jamaica, which is really 
like writing about the present times without mention- 
ing the Great War. You must mention the colour 
question. If a man is charming and courteous and 
well educated, what can it matter what his shade, 
and I who was brought up in Australia, where the 
colour question is a burning one, can say this with 
feeling. 

I have listened to a white woman, whose only 
recommendation was that she was white, draw herself 
up and sniff when speaking of a highly cultivated 
man whose only fault in her eyes could be that there 
was a trace of colour in his veins. 

"Well, I promised my husband I'd receive him, 
but his wife — I do draw the line at his wife." 

I could see no reason why she should not receive 
his wife, who had seen a great deal more of the 
world than she had and was a much more interesting 

76 





[Face page 70. 



DIFFICULTY OF DRESS 77 

personality. Every man has a right to choose his 
personal friends, but it seems to me the only reason 
why a community should ban a race is when that 
race lowers the standard of living and so imperils 
the life of the master people. This, of course, is 
at the root of the colour question, and I could write 
a book about it. 

Men and women with just a dash of the tar brush 
are often extremely good looking, in fact, never have 
I seen more beautiful children than in Jamaica, 
save possibly in Sicily, where a dash of colour from 
Africa thrown into the stock long, long ago, makes 
for beauty. But the black man, however good 
looking, however well educated, has one handicap ; 
a stiffly starched white shirt-front and a black evening 
coat bear very heavily indeed on him. He may be 
college bred, have the softest and most cultivated 
of voices, but the dress imposed upon him by civilisa- 
tion is apt to take away from his dignity. In Africa 
they are beginning to realise this, and the Ashanti 
Chief is never allowed to dress in European costume, 
and he looks every inch a Chief in the beautiful silken 
robes, the gay colours of which set off the complexion 
the sun has kissed. 

And if a black man looks bad in fashionable 
clothes, the black woman looks even worse. How 
this can be mended I know not; but I feel sure that 
as soon as the black people find a style of dress 
that will set off their beauty, much of the feeling 
against coloured blood will vanish. 

It is coming. I went to church one day in 
Kingston, and, I think, with the exception of the 
minister in black Geneva gown and white bands, I 
was the only full-blooded white person present. But 
the church was full and the people struck me as 
being very good looking and well dressed, especially 



78 THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

the little children. A dainty little girl of African 
blood with flashing dark eyes and milk-white teeth, 
dressed in white embroidery with white socks and 
shoes and a white ribbon in her dark hair, is a thing 
of beauty. 

The most lovely girl I have ever seen in my life 
is a Creole with a little coloured blood in her veins. 
She has long brown hair, splendid dark eyes, white 
teeth, and a clear skin of pale brown that is soft 
as velvet. She is more than common tall, but so 
well proportioned that you do not think so until 
you see her beside some other woman. She is an 
athlete, she can ride, she can dance, and she can 
swim and dive like a fish. Truly a daughter of 
the Gods is she, and Jamaica may be proud of her. 

There are people who will say, " Yes, at nineteen, 
but these Creoles always go off, their beauty does 
not last. They grow old so soon." Exactly the same 
was said of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. 
The Creole who lives wisely, as women are beginning 
to live everywhere nowadays, is quite as likely to 
be good looking at forty, or even at sixty, I think, 
as the daughter of a cooler clime. Of course if she 
yield to indolence and do nothing but suck sweets 
or smoke cigarettes and sleep, why, the inevitable 
will happen. 

My daughter of the tropics is abounding in life. 
She owns a canoe, the Dodo, a little light boat, 
with which she can go skimming over the waters 
of Montego Bay. 

"I only take the children who can swim well," 
says she, " and when I was younger, they won't 
let me now I'm grown up, we used to visit all the 
schooners and cutters that came into the bay." 

The logwood schooners are manned by Norwegians, 
big fair men, who complimented her on her skill in 



A DAUGHTER OF THE GODS 79 

managing a boat, and said she ought to have come 
from the North, "though why," said she, "shouldn't 
a Creole sail a boat % " And there are big brown 
men from the Cayman Islands, descendants of the 
buccaneers, giants with the blood of all the nations 
of the world in their veins. They trade in salt. 
And men of all shades, from palest yellow to the 
blackest black, go dodging in and out of Jamaican 
ports, and one and all they carry on their bowsprits 
a shark's fin to make their little ships sail well. 

" But why," I asked, " did you only take children 
who could swim 1 " 

"Because," she laughed, "if you fall out of a 
canoe you can't get in again." And she told me how 
on one occasion the laden canoe became extremely 
interested in an electric eel lying on the bottom, 
for the water of the bay is beautifully clear, and 
all rushed to one side to inspect. Over went the 
little craft, and then the biggest boy, aged I think 
12, saw the danger and flung himself to the other 
side. He was just in time. The boat righted itself, 
but he lost his balance and fell into the water, with 
more than a mile to go before he reached the shore. 
No wonder young Diana insists that all her passengers 
should be able to swim well. 

There are some useful citizens growing up in 
Montego Bay for a nation that counts herself the 
ruler of the seas. 

I set out to write about the Castles on the Guinea 
Coast, and I have wandered to the shores of Monteco 
Bay on the other side of the Atlantic, and yet they are 
not as far apart as one would think. 

It is a far, far cry from the days when the 
Portuguese, and the English, and Dutch, and Danes, 
and Brandenburgers, and Swedes, built with slave 
labour great stone castles with walls and bastions, 



80 THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

towers, and portcullises, all along the Guinea Coast 
from the mouth of the Gambia River to Whydah in 
Dahomey. The castles are there to-day to tell the 
tale, and some years ago before the war I travelled 
along 300 miles of that coast in a hammock borne on 
men's heads, and again and again as we moved along, 
our pace regulated by that of the slowest carrier who 
bore my goods upon his head, there loomed up before 
us either on a jutting headland, or at the head of 
some shallow bay, the grey and massive walls of 
some long - forgotten Castle. Truly one may say 
forgotten, only a few officials remember these trading 
strongholds of the past, and if some care, those in 
authority declare they are not worth keeping up since 
they are but relics of an iniquitous trade that is best 
not remembered. 

But the past cannot be wiped out. I hardly 
understood that till I came to Jamaica, till I watched 
the black women in ragged frocks and dilapidated 
hats weeding my garden, till I saw the roads thronged 
with them bearing burdens on their heads. It was 
forced upon me more emphatically when there came 
into my compound in Montego Bay one of the men 
who helped mend the roads in the forlornest remains 
of what had once been a shirt and trousers, while on 
his arm he wore what made him look like the savage 
he was, a bracelet of some red composition which 
had doubtless by its bright colour caught his eye. 
These were the same people, the very same people 
who had been brought from the Guinea Coast, more 
than one hundred, more than two hundred years ago. 
They are the same people you see on the Guinea 
Coast to-day. They called the people from this 
coast Koromantyns, and though they were, they said, 
the best slaves to be had, strong and vigorous, yet the 
French and Spanish refused to buy them, for they 



RUINS OF KOROMANTYN 81 

were warlike and were apt to rise and tight fiercely 
for their liberty. Probably many of them had 
Ashanti blood in their veins, and the Ashantis made 
good fighting men. The Krobos, too, were a little 
more to the East, and the Krobos were savages who, 
even in this century, allowed no young man to marry 
until he had killed his man. 

Often these fortified castles of the different 
European nations were within a stone's throw of 
each other, often they were destroyed, often they 
changed hands as the power of one nation waxed or 
waned, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
the trade was the great thing and these men of old 
held their little scraps of land, held them though the 
holding cost them many lives. 

Koromantyn, a Castle not far from Cape Coast, 
was the chief trading place of the English along that 
shore, till De Ruyter knocked it about their ears. 
The custom of the English, I judged, when they built 
a Castle for themselves, and did not take it from some 
one else, was to choose a site at the head of a bay 
and build close down to the water's edge, but 
Koromantyn departs from the usual practice and 
was built on high rising ground, a site the Portuguese 
(Portugals the old mariners called them) themselves 
might have chosen. I have thought of it many a 
time since I came to Jamaica, for always the slave 
risings — and the risings were many — were headed by 
the Koromantyns. Even now, guarding nothing, for 
the courtyard is overgrown with tropical vegetation, 
its ruined walls rise up tall and steep and straight, 
and at their foot among the rubble and coarse grass, 
lie rusting the cannon that once made them formidable. 

Remember, it was not only the black men who 
suffered, for if with cruel force upon the sons of Ham 
fell the primeval curse, the venturesome men who 



82 THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

dared so much for greed and adventure were not 
exempt. And they were venturesome. Reading 
between the lines as we look up the old records, 
we feel that the trials endured in the finding of 
the Poles were more than equalled by what these 
traders of old must have borne in their search for 
wealth, the wealth ofttimes being for someone else. 
The gold is only found further inland now, the 
elephant is gone, and the trade in men is dead. 
Dead, yes ; but it is impossible to forget here in 
Jamaica, or as you wander along the Guinea Coast. 
The sands of the sea cry the story, the shame, shame, 
shame of it ! the tumbling waves take it up, and insist 
as they crash on the sand in the still hot noonday, 
or in the glory of the moonlight night, that the end is 
not yet. I did not understand what they cried to me 
then, but Jamaica cries out, "Here, here, is the un- 
finished work of those old time slavers, here is the job 
incomplete, left for Britain to finish as best she may." 
One hot day in March I left Cape Coast and 
came by the sea-shore, ten miles or more, along the 
yielding sand, just beyond reach of the furious white 
surf, but not out of the reach of its spray, and the 
memories of the men of old, the men who traded 
here when Cromwell ruled in England, when Queen 
Anne sat on the throne, when the unwelcome Georges 
came over from Hanover, crowded thick in every 
grove of coconut palms, rose to meet me on every 
grassy headland. The footsteps of the hammock 
bearers were clearly marked, and the waves came 
sweeping up and swept them away, the black crabs, 
like so many pincushions on stilts, raced after the 
receding waters, and the wading-birds stalked over the 
half-liquid sand seeking their livelihood. Overhead 
was the heavy blue African sky, on the right, the dark 
blue sea with white-topped breakers that rushed from 



AN OLD TIME TRADER 83 

the Pole, half a world away, to fling themselves in 
thunderous clamour upon the Guinea Coast, and on 
the left was a low sandy ridge covered with sparse 
sea-grass and broad-leaved creeping bean. Just such 
a bean grows on the sea-shore, outside the gates of 
my house here in Montego Bay, where I write this 
book. Here and there was a little low undergrowth 
and coarse elephant grass, and again and again were 
palm-thatched villages, with surf boats drawn up on 
the sand, and groves of coconut palms that added 
beauty to the scene. The brawny, dark men fished, 
flinging their nets into the sea, or launched their surf 
boats on a wider venture, and the women beat their 
cassava or banana into kenky or fufu, and the little 
naked pot-bellied children played in the shade as 
children play all the world over, and raced to see the 
unusual sight of a white woman who had departed from 
the usual custom of the white folks and come along 
the shore. 

Such is the scene now, such was the scene more 
than three hundred years ago, when the maiden Queen 
sat on the throne of England and Hawkins made his 
first expedition, such was the scene a hundred years 
later when Phillips in the Hannibal of 450 tons and 
36 guns came on an expedition trading for gold, 
elephants' teeth, and slaves — more especially for 
slaves. I thought of those old-world men as we 
passed along, and the sea kept wiping out all traces 
of the passing of my hammock bearers. But the 
people would remember that in such a year a white 
woman had passed that way, even as I remembered 
that Phillips had passed. And the cool of the 
morning passed, and the breathless sweltering March 
midday of the Guinea Coast held all the land, and 
grey stone walls loomed up clear-cut against the blue 
of the sky. 



84 THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

"A Castle?" 

"Annamabu, Ma. You chop?" That was all 
my headman thought. For him there was no past. 
He had come from Cape Coast this morning — if 
he could only make me see that it was fit and 
suitable that I should stay at Annamabu till the 
following morning, that was all the future he asked. 

Annamabu is right on the sea-shore, built upon 
the rocks that crop out of the surrounding sand. 
So did the English keep watch and ward over their 
trade here. It is a great square grey pile, dignified 
in its very simplicity, and the only entrance is 
through a low tunnel in the great wall, narrow, 
and nowhere more than five feet four high. Once 
the dark people of the land took Annamabu, 
how, I cannot imagine, for those straight grim 
walls would seem to defy anything that a savage 
people could bring against them. There was a town 
at a little distance, built for the most part with 
the swish walls and thatched roofs common to the 
country, but here and there, shabby with the shabbi- 
ness of the tropics and the negro combined, were 
stone houses built on European lines that must 
have been miniature forts in their time. There 
is no need of a fort now, there is peace in the 
land, even the mighty pile of the Castle is delivered 
over to the care of the negroes, and the glory is 
departed. I went up the slanting path to the 
narrow entrance, the entrance, grim and dark and 
damp, and I got out of my hammock for it was 
too narrow to admit a hammock, and walked into 
the courtyard where the powers that be, represented 
by a medical officer some miles away along the 
shore, had piled up a store of boards to make certain 
accommodation for the town of Annamabu, which 
the inhabitants of the town of Annamabu, being 




Photo by] 



Annamabu Fort. 



[the Author. 




Photo h)j) 



Gateway, Annamabu Fort. 



[the Author. 



| Face page S4. 



SLAVE LABOUR 85 

children of nature, will never use. The sun beat 
down in that courtyard and took one's energy away. 
How, how in this languid, languishing heat were 
these mighty stones ever piled one upon the other? 
Only, surely, by slave labour, only, surely, by the 
aid of the whip and the goad. 

" The negro inhabitants are accounted very bold 
and stout fellows," said Phillips of the Hannibal 
who had come to enslave them, "but the most 
desperate, treacherous villains and great cheats upon 
the whole coast, for the gold here is accounted the 
worst and most mixed with brass of any in Guiny. 
The Castle, pretty strong, of about 18 guns." 

It was an offshoot of Koromantyn and was 
built by the Royal Adventurers of England in 1624, 
but Admiral de Ruyter, the Dutchman, in 1665 
drove them out and took the castle, not without 
a good deal of bloodshed. But in 1673 a new 
company, the Royal African Company was formed, 
and out of the wrecked remains of what de Ruyter 
had left they built up the present castle. It was 
mysterious to go out of the garish sunshine of the 
courtyard into the gloom of the tunnelled staircase 
that led to the bastion, and to remember that Phillips 
and men of his ilk had passed up that self- same 
staircase more than two hundred years before, had 
stood on that self- same bastion in like hot sunshine, 
had watched the vultures settle on the roof of the 
little ammunition house in the corner, and the flag 
of Britain flutter out from the flag-staff that the 
hard cement foundation supported. Beyond was 
the sea, whence had come those grim old slavers, 
and I, a woman from the South, the land of liberty. 
All round the walls from their embrasures grinned 
those eighteen guns that defended the castle and 
terrorised the negroes. And round them is piled 

G 



86 THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

up the shot that has never been used and will 
never be used now. On the west side the coconut 
palms have grown up, the wind whispers among 
the fronds that overshadow the guns, whispers that 
though their day is done the problem that they 
started still remains, and has only been taken with 
blood and bitter tears to the other side of the 
Atlantic. By the sea-shore of this lovely island 
I hear its echo crying mournfully. In one of the 
embrasures of the wall from among the piled shot 
had grown up a green pawpaw tree. The pawpaw 
is but an ephemeral thing, a tree of a year or so, 
but its fruit is good to eat. Shall good come out 
of evil? It marks decay too. Not so would they 
have kept the castle when Phillips saluted with 
seven guns to show he was minded to trade for 
those "stalwart villains," the men of Annamabu. 

Everything is very straight up and down, very 
square and grey and solid. Possibly Mr Searle, 
the factor Phillips talks about, and his young 
mulatto wife dwelt in those rooms or in rooms 
not unlike them, very tall and large, with great 
window spaces. There was little furniture in my 
time, though this was supposed to be a rest-house. 
But no man ever comes along the coast now, now 
that the slaves are not, and the gold is not, and 
the elephants are gone. The place is held solely 
for the benefit of the negro, and the dust has settled 
on everything. There are customs clerks and 
telegraph clerks, but they are negro, and as yet 
they do not care. Neither do the English who 
dwell and rule from Accra, for Accra is far, when 
the only means of progression is a man's pace, 
and the rulers say, "These old shells of castles 
are not worth preserving." Are they not ? 

But, indeed and indeed, the air is thick with 



POOR, HAPPY, SAD, PITIFUL CHILDREN 87 

memories. Here, in these dark rooms on the ground 
floor, hot and airless, did they store their goods in 
olden days, "perpetuanos and sayes, knives, old 
sheets, pewter basons and muskets," which Phillips 
has left on record were the best goods with which 
to buy slaves on the Gold Coast in the seventeenth 
century. They did not bring out their women, but 
they took to themselves wives of the daughters 
of the land, comely, smooth-skinned, dark-eyed girls, 
with full, round bosoms and a carriage like queens, 
and the daughters of these unions were much 
sought after. 

"Then came Mrs Rankin," writes Phillips, of a 
factor's temporary wife, "who was a pretty young 
mulatto with a rich silk cloth about her middle, 
and a silk cap upon her head, flowered with gold 
and silver, under which her hair was combed out 
at length, for the mulattoes covet to wear it so 
in imitation of the whites " — remember the white 
men wore their hair long in those days — "never 
curling it up or letting it frizzle as the blacks do. 
She was accompanied, or rather attended by the 
second's and doctor's wives, who were young blacks 
about thirteen years of age. This is a very pleasant 
way of marrying," goes on the gossipy mariner, 
"for they can turn them off and take others at 
pleasure, which makes them very careful to humour 
their husbands in washing their linen, cleaning 
their chambers, etc., and the charge of keeping 
them is little or nothing." 

Poor children, poor, happy, sad, pitiful children, 
bearing children and taking a woman's part in 
ministering to the pleasures of these their masters 
at an age when our children would still be babies 
in the nursery. It was a custom that died hard. 
Twelve years ago the nursing sister at Sekondi told 



88 THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

me that when first she was stationed there she 
saw a girl, just arrived at marriageable age, sent 
round to all the likely white men in the town, 
tricked out in all the bravery common to the 
occasion. She saw her return, too, return in tears, 
not because she had been chosen, but because she 
had not ! The standard of morals is higher on 
the coast in these times. 

And the end of these women ? No one has 
ever told us of their end. I remember when I 
was in Sekondi a sad-faced mulatto woman with 
the remains — only the remains — of great beauty about 
her, though possibly she was barely thirty-five, and 
the nursing sister shook her head over Adjuah. 

"She is going to die," she said. "She does 
not care to live." It appears she had lived with 
some white man who had been fond of her as he 
passed by, and she had given him her whole soul. 
Then came the inevitable, the time when he 
departed for Accra, and Adjuah was distracted. 
She could not believe he had left her for ever, 
and she, too, started along the coast for the distant 
town. Like many another loving woman she felt 
if he could only see her all would be well. But 
barely a day's journey along the coast came the 
great Prah river, and it passed her powers to 
cross it. She waited there for days, and then, 
reluctantly, all along the burning sands she crawled 
back wearily to the shelter of the woman she 
knew would care for her, and there she waited 
listlessly — to die. Is that what happened to these 
little girls flaunting it so proudly in their silken 
clothes? Indeed, worse things might happen to 
them. Possibly they were sold as slaves ; most 
surely their children were, for it is said in Jamaica 
that every overseer and book-keeper took a mistress 



THE SLAVER AND THE MULATTO GIRL 89 

from among the slaves, a girl who came to him 
gladly for the betterment of her lot, but she knew 
and he knew that their children must be born 
into servitude, and the father, when the time came 
for him to go, left them as lightly as he would 
so many cattle. 

Spear, in his book on the American slave trade, 
tells how, in the days when the trade was being 
suppressed, the British warship Medina, on boarding 
a slaver off the Gallinas River, found no slaves on 
board. "The officers learned afterwards, however, 
that her captain really had had a mulatto girl in the 
cabin. He kept her for some time after the cruiser 
appeared, but seeing that he was to be boarded, and 
knowing that the presence of one slave was enough 
to condemn the ship, he tied her to a kedge anchor 
and dropped her into the sea. And so, as is 
believed, he drowned his own unborn flesh and 
blood, as well as the slave girl." Think of the 
state of public opinion when a whole crew could 
stand calmly by, or even give a hand to perpetrate 
such an atrocious deed. Is it any wonder that, on 
any land where was such slavery as this, there seems 
to have fallen a curse ; less favoured lands have 
flourished, but gorgeous tropical countries, where 
vegetation runs riot, have not kept abreast in the 
race. Surely those unconscious little girls, un- 
conscious of their own woes, sometimes the pampered 
slave, bound to be the out-cast slave in the end, 
have brought a curse upon them. It broods over 
Africa. It is here in Jamaica, it will take much 
wisdom and many many years to work it off. 

Of course it was not only the women who suffered. 
Slavery was the custom of the time, and men and 
women alike were chattels. It was the pitiful 
pretence to place and power that makes us feel 



90 THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

more keenly the case of these little girls who were 
wives and yet no wives, and gained honour for a 
brief season by being associated with the white men. 

And in Annamabu came home to me clearly, the 
cargoes, the thrice-accursed cargoes these men had 
set their hearts upon, the cargoes that were the 
raison d'etre of these heavily armed castles. In 
Phillips' day a really good negro might be bought 
on the Coast at a cost of about £4 for the most 
expensive, while he might be sold for about £19 in 
Jamaica or Barbadoes. 

"X had two little negro boys presented to me 
here," says he with a certain satisfaction, "by our 
honest factors, and two more at Cape Corso." 
Nobody considered the feelings of the boys torn from 
their homes. And well might he be pleased, for 
these presumably were his private property, and not 
to be accounted among the cargo. When Ansumanah, 
my own serving boy, sat in the shade at the bottom 
of the flight of stairs that led up to the bastion, 
I remembered Phillips' two little boys who had 
attended their master here. The stone steps are 
worn, worn in the years by the passing of many 
unshod feet, sad and glad and hopeful and despairing, 
but what had the little boys that Phillips was 
taking to the Indies to hope for % 

Exactly at Annamabu he did not gather his slaves, 
but a little farther along the Coast. Here he took 
on board 180 chests of corn with which to feed 
them. The little squat ship having laid in her 
provisions, went slowly along the coast, and in the 
daylight the people came off in their canoes, and 
at night they lighted fires along the shore as a sign 
they had something to trade, and their trade goods 
were always the same, gold, elephants' teeth, that 
is, ivory, or men, and generally they required the 



A PLEDGE OF FRIENDSHIP 91 

captain to come down over the side of his ship and 
drop three drops of sea water in his eye as a pledge 
of friendship and of safety for them to come aboard, 
" which " says Phillips, " I very readily consented to 
and performed in hopes of a good market." 

Sometimes he got ivory, but his ship was a slaver, 
slaves she was looking for and slaves she would get, 
for might was right and wars were perpetually 
waged — by the black men be it understood — in order 
that there might be plenty of the commodity. The 
commodity, being flesh and blood, suffered. 

" The master of her brought in three women and 
four children to sell," he remarks casually of a canoe 
that hailed him from the shore, "but he asked very 
dear for them and they were almost dead from 
want of victuals, looking like mere skeletons and so 
weak they could not stand, so that they were not 
worth buying. He promised to procure us two 
or three hundred slaves if we would anchor and 
come ashore and stay two or three days, but, judging 
what the others might be by the sample he brought 
us, and being loth to venture ashore upon his bare 
word, where we did not use to trade and had no 
factory, we sent him away and resumed our voyage." 

He has left us a very graphic account of the 
manner in which he and the captain of the East 
Indian Merchant bought their wares. The slaves 
were evidently got in small parcels, secured in the 
factories and shipped off on calm days, for the surf 
of the Guinea Coast would not always allow of a 
landing. Where they kept them at Annamabu or 
in the dominant factory at Koromantyn, I do not 
know, probably in the court-yard or in the dark 
dungeons, dark and hot and airless that surrounded 
it, and the reek of them must have gone up to 
heaven, calling down a curse upon those captors 



92 THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

who were apparently so unconscious of wrongdoing. 
At Whidah, to which Phillips traded from Annamabu, 
it is not very far away, there was only a small 
factory, and the local chief or "king" collected the 
slaves for sale and kept them in a "trunk," which 
Phillips and the captain of the East Indian Merchant, 
attended by their respective doctors and pursers, 
visited daily to make their purchases. 

The purser's business was to pay for the goods 
I suppose, and the surgeon he considers absolutely 
necessary. 

"Our surgeon examined them well in all kinds 
to see that they were sound, wind and limb, making 
them jump, stretch out their arms swiftly, looking 
in their mouths to judge of their age ; for the 
cappashiers are so cunning that they shave them all 
close before we see them, so that, let them be never 
so old, we can see no grey hairs in their heads or 
beards, and then, having liquored them well and 
sleek with palm oil, 'tis no easy matter to know 
an old one from a middle-aged one but by the 
teeth's decay . . . therefore our surgeon is forced to 
examine . . . both men and women with the nicest 
scrutiny which is a great slavery but can't be omitted." 

" This place where the slaves were kept day and 
night," he records, putting the matter very plainly, 
"was so foul that I often fainted with the horrid 
stink of the negroes." And he was a hard-bitten 
sailor of the seventeenth century accustomed to the 
close evil- smelling ships of his period ! But he has 
no particular word of pity for the closely-herded 
negroes whose condition produced such a state of 
affairs. 

"We marked the slaves we had bought in the 
breast or shoulder with a hot iron having the letter 
of the ship's name upon it, the place being before 



THE WILFUL NEGROES 93 

anointed with a little palm oil which caused but 
little pain, the mark being usually well in four or 
five days, appearing very plain and white after." 
And this is an allegory surely. The mark that 
slavery made has always appeared very plain after. 

And when the surf allowed, the slaves were 
marched down to the shore and "our canoes carry 
them off to the long boat, and she conveyed them 
aboard ship where the men were all put in irons 
two and two, shackled together, to prevent their 
mutiny or swimming ashore." 

" The negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their 
own country," he records mournfully as a man who 
may expect sympathy, "that they have often leaped 
out of the canoe, boat, and ship, into the sea, and 
kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid 
being taken up and saved by our boats which pursued 
them, they having a more dreadful apprehension of 
Barbadoes than we can have of hell, tho' in reality 
they live much better there than in their own 
country." The shackling as an introduction to this 
improved home life was perhaps not calculated to 
inspire confidence. "But home is home," moralises 
Phillips. "We have likewise seen divers of them 
eaten by sharks, of which a prodigious number kept 
about the ships in this place. We had about twelve 
negroes did wilfully drown themselves, and others 
starved themselves to death, for 'tis their belief that 
when they die they return home to their own country 
and friends again. I have been informed that some 
commanders have cut off the legs of the most wilful 
to terrify the rest, for they believe if they lose a 
member they cannot return home again. I was 
advised by some of my officers to do the same, but 
I could not be persuaded to entertain the least 
thoughts of it, much less to put in practice such 



94 THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

barbarous cruelty to poor creatures who, excepting 
their want of Christianity, true religion (their mis- 
fortune, more than fault) are as much the works 
of God's Hands and no doubt as dear to Him as 
ourselves." Surprising words from a slaver ! 

He himself has but a poor opinion of the men 
of his calling. 

"They commonly undermine, betray, and outbid 
one another," he writes, "and the Guiney com- 
manders' words and promises are the least to be 
depended upon of any I know use the sea, for they 
would deceive their fathers in their trade if they 
could." 

And then when the slaves were on board, and 
the grey castles were down on the horizon, and the 
long, long voyage was begun, there were troubles not 
only for the wretched merchandise, but for those 
who carried them. 

"When our slaves are aboard," he says again, 
"we shackle them two and two while we lie in 
port, and in sight of their own country, for 'tis then 
they attempt to make their escape or mutiny, to 
prevent which we always keep sentinels upon the 
hatchways, and have a chest of small arms ready 
loaden and trim'd, constantly lying at hand upon 
the quarterdeck together with some granada shells, 
and two of our quarterdeck guns pointing on the 
deck thence, and two more out of the steerage, the 
door of which is always kept shut and well barred. 

" They are fed twice a day, at 10 in the morning, 
and 4 in the evening, which is the time they are 
apt to mutiny, being all upon the deck ; therefore, all 
that time what of our men who are not employed 
in distributing their victuals to them and settling 
them, stand to their arms with lighted matches at 
the great guns that yawn upon them, loaden with 



LORD, THE TRUMPETER 95 

cartridge, till they have done and gone below to 
their kennels between decks." 

What a picture of life aboard a slaver ! 

"Great mortality among the slaves," he writes 
wearily later on, "which together with their stink 
and nastiness " — and he goes on feelingly to tell of 
a Dutch skipper, Clause, who said if his owners 
would give him £100 per month to go and carry 
negroes again, he would not take it, but would sooner 
go elsewhere a common sailor, for 20 guilders a 
month. 

No wonder. Out of 700 taken on board the 
Hannibal some died every day, and by the time 
they reached Barbadoes they had thrown overboard 
320 of them, and all the comment her master makes 
is that it was a clear loss to the owners, the African 
Company, of £10 for every negro that so died. 

But there is another thing he notices with intense 
surprise. He was "forced to clap one Lord, the 
trumpeter, in irons, for his being the promoter of 
unseasonable carousing bouts," we can understand 
it would never have done for the crew to indulge 
in such bouts with such a cargo, "and though he 
remained upon the poop day and night in irons for 
two months, without any other shelter than the 
canopy of heaven, he was never troubled with any 
sickness, but made good the proverb that 'Naught's 
never in danger.'" And while he goes on com- 
plaining of enduring so "much misery and stench 
among a parcel of creatures nastier than swine," it 
never occurs to him, or to anybody else for that 
matter, for many a long day, that he had provided 
his recreant trumpeter with at least one safeguard 
in plenty of air. 

Three hundred and twenty negroes murdered on 
that voyage alone. No wonder " Ichabod " is written 



96 THE CASTLES ON THE GUINEA COAST 

over those old castles. Koromantyn that was once 
the chief stronghold, head castle of the English, is 
no more, its guns are • red with rust, its walls are 
crumbling to ruin, its courtyards are desolate and 
grass-grown, and the people from the neighbouring 
villages go there when they want shaped stones. 
Annamabu still stands a model of what these castles 
used to be — with the exception of Elmina, the best 
model and best preserved along the 300 miles of 
coast. Cape Coast has been used for many purposes, 
but no white man can live there, because no servant 
will stay there, they declare it is haunted. "Well it 
might be, for the dungeons are deep and dark, and 
assuredly they have been used. Kommenda is a 
shell, and no native will go into the courtyard where 
the bush is beginning to grow up because there is 
ju-ju upon it, and the evil spirits make it their home. 
At Annamabu, as I sat at luncheon, there came up 
a quick tropical storm. The roar of the wind hushed 
the sound of the ceaseless surf, the coconut palms 
bent before it, and the rain came down in torrents. 
It blotted out the sea, it swept off the bastion in 
streams, it beat down the breakers, and like a grey 
mist it shut out the surrounding landscape. 

" You stop here, Ma," said my head man with a 
satisfaction he did not conceal. 

Stop there ? With all the ghosts of the past ? 
Would not the mulatto girl, who was the factor's 
wife, come back and walk along this bastion, as 
she must have done more than two hundred years 
ago ? Would she be sad ? Or glad ? Or proud ? 
Would not the men and women who had been driven 
so unwillingly through that long-tunnelled entrance, 
been shut up in those dark dungeons on the ground 
floor, come back mourning and wailing ? Would 
not the white man, who had looked out over the sea 



LINK BETWEEN JAMAICA AND GUINEA COAST 97 

with longing eyes, come tramping those stones again, 
heedless of dark mistress or coffers slowly piling 
with gold, counting the days, as he had counted them 
so often, when in his own pleasant land again he 
would enjoy the fruits of his labour? Stay? No, a 
thousand times, no, no. And the tropical storm 
passed, the golden rays of the afternoon sun fell 
through the slanting rain drops, and then the rain 
stopped and a mist rose up from the wet stones, and 
the sea lay blue, reflecting the blue sky above, and I 
went down the steps and into the tunnel, and out 
of the courtyard and away along the sea-shore past 
Koromantyn, and only in Jamaica did I realise that 
by the merest chance, I had seen and appreciated the 
beginnings of the iniquitous Middle Passage, that I 
had come upon the place whence came all the slaves 
who led the insurrections in that island for close on 
two hundred years. 

I have wandered in my life, far and wide, east 
and west, but that remote castle on the Guinea Coast 
made a far deeper impression than many a more 
important place. 



CHAPTER V 

THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

All up and down the roads of Jamaica tramp 
ceaselessly the dark people. In the towns now, I 
notice many of the men, when they have anything to 
carry, carry it in their hands, under their arms, or on 
their backs, but the women are not so progressive. 
I don't quite believe the yarn about the girl, who, 
having been sent to buy a postage stamp, put it on 
her head, with a stone to keep it in place, but, 
certainly, the women still adhere to the old African 
way of bearing a burden on their heads. From my 
verandah all day, and twenty times a day, I could 
see men arranging the load on their companion's 
head, and the woman accepting the help offered, and 
trotting along meekly behind the man, though he 
went empty-handed. 

Men and women are in all shades, but mostly, of 
course, black, often with the woolly hair and thick 
coarse lips, that are considered typical of the negro. 
They are not. They are typical of men with low 
ideals. I have seen black men with faces as fine as 
the best Europeans, and I am sure that the features 
of a man's face are apt to be altered by his mode 
of life and his thoughts. Of course, it is his thoughts 
that do it, but his thoughts are produced by his 
environment. He is a wonderful man who is able to 
rise above the degrading environment forced upon 




[ Face page 08. 



MONTESQUIEU ON SLAVERY 99 

him by circumstances. Up to the present the negro 
has been handicapped, and when I see a black man 
with a fine face, in my mind, I make him obeisance. 
He has come up a long way, far, far farther than 
his white prototype. 

And his unwilling forebears were brought to 
Jamaica by the accursed Middle Passage. 

It was so called because a ship went from 
England or America to the Guinea Coast, thence to 
the West Indies or wherever there was a market for 
slaves, which was seldom at her home port, and 
thence back empty to refit. Hence the Middle 
Passage, a term which, before I investigated the 
matter, always puzzled me. 

The horrors of the Middle Passage were of no 
account to the men who did the trading. It was 
an uncomfortable job, as the Dutch Skipper Clause 
found, but there was money in it, men were not 
very tender even of each other in olden days, and 
they counted as little the pains suffered by the 
luckless people whom they held in bondage. Says 
Montesquieu, who was before his time, "Slavery is 
not good in itself. It is useful neither to the master 
nor the slave. Not to the slave because he can 
do nothing from virtuous motives. Not to the master, 
because he contracts among his slaves all sorts of 
bad habits, and accustoms himself to the neglect of 
all the moral virtues. He becomes haughty, 
passionate, obdurate, vindictive, voluptuous, and 
cruel." He might have added that the men who 
made the slaves held a still worse position. Once 
we begin to investigate, we find that the captains 
of the slavers were almost invariably ruthlessly cruel. 

Not quite all. There is mention made in the 
American Historical Record of David Lindsay, who 
in 1740 was trading on the Guinea Coast. Here 



100 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

is a letter written by one George Scott, who meeting 
Captain Lindsay at sea on the 13th June 1740, 
entrusts him with this letter and all his gold. He 
says he left Annamabu on the 8th May, and he had 
only reached 39*30° W. No wonder he reports that 
his voyage is miserable, and he has lost twenty -nine 
slaves out of a cargo of one hundred and twenty- 
nine. The surprising thing is that he can report 
that "the slaves we have now is all recovered." 

The ships were tiny. David Lindsay, according 
to Spear, was in 1752 in command of the brigantine 
Sanderson, "a square stern'd vessel of the burthen of 
about 40 tons." What a cockle shell ! and he, too, 
writes from "Anamaboe, 28th February 1753. . . . 
The traid is so dull, it is actually a noof to make a 
man creasey." He has been obliged to buy a cable, 
and he begs his owners "not to Blaim me in so 
doeing. I should be glad I cood come Rite home 
with my slaves, for my vesiel will not last to proceed 
farr. We can see daylight al round her bow under 
deck. However, I hope She will carry me safe 
home once more. I need not inlarge." So he, too, 
lay outside the surf at Annamabu, he, too, walked on 
the bastion and discussed with the factors his 
chances. Oh, they were plucky men those first 
slavers, if they were brutes, but Lindsay I do not 
think was a brute. And on that last day of February 
1753, there must have been quite a fleet of slavers. 
"Heare lyes Captains hamlet, James Jepson, 
Carpenter, Butler, & Lindsay. Gardner is dun." 
"firginson," he goes on with a pleasant disregard of 
the uses of capitals, " is Gon to Leward. All these is 
Rum ships. . . . I've sent a Small boy to my wife. 
I conclude with my' best Endeavors for Intrust. 
Gentlemen, your faithful Servant at Comind, David 
Lindsay. 



GRAPHIC LETTERS 101 

" N.B. — -On the whole I never had so much 
Trouble in all my voiges. I shall rite to barbadoes 
in a few days." A pleasant letter to come down to 
us out of the years and written by a slaver too ! 
His officers were sick and so were three of the 
men in the forecastle, and he feared lest the slaves 
in the hold, learning how short-handed he was, might 
rise up and make a bid for their freedom, but worse 
than all was the leaky condition of the ship. Well 
for her that she sailed in sunny seas, in the season 
when hurricanes were hardly to be feared, but I 
felt a thrill of triumph when on the 17th June of 
the same year he was able to write from Barbadoes, 

" Gentle'n : — These are to acqt of my arrival heare 
ye Day before yesterday in 10 weeks from Anamaboe. 
I met on my passage 22 days of very squally winds 
& continued Rains, so that it beat my sails alto 
pieces, soe that I was oblige Several Days to have 
Sails on bent to mend them. The vesiel likewise 
is all open Round her bows under deck. . . . My 
slaves is not landed yet ; they are 58 in number for 
owners, all in helth & fatt. I lost one small gall." 
The health of the slaves does him credit in so small 
a ship. With my faith in fresh air I cannot help 
wondering if some of it was not due to that opening 
round the ship's bows under deck. 

After a few more remarks he says, " I left 
Captain Hamblet at Cape Coast sick. His slaves 
had rose, and they lost the best of what they had." 
What happened to the slaves? The slave trade 
is full of such unfinished stories. 

There is another letter from Annamabu from one 
George Scott. "We have now aboard one hundred 
and no gold. I think to purchase about twenty 
& go off ye coast : ye time of ye year [it was April], 
don't doe to tarry much longer. Everything of 

ii 



102 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

provisions is very dear and scarce : it costs for water 
Ten shillings for one day. I think to stay in this 
place but fourteen days more. We shall go to 
Shama and water our vessel." 

Shama or Chama is another slave castle about 
half a day's journey from Sekondi. Grim high walls 
surround it, and the only entrance is approached by 
the wide steps in a half circle, steps that we so 
often see approaching the entrance to an old house 
in Jamaica. At the Hyde there were the same sort 
of circular steps that I met at Chama, but at Chama 
they came up to a narrow entrance that two men, 
in those days, might hold for a week against great 
odds. 

This slaver goes on to say he thinks he will sail 
off the coast from Chama with about 120 slaves 
cargo. "We have left about two hundred pound 
sterg in goods which wont sell here to any profitt. 
Every man slave that we pay all Goods for here, 
costs twelve pounds sterg prime. I hope I shall 
be in Barbadoes ye latter end of June but have 
not concluded whither we shall go to Jamaica or 
Virginia ; our slaves is mostly large. 60 men and 
boys, 20 women, the rest boys and girls, but three 
under four foot high. Pray excuse all blunders and 
bad writing for I have no time to coppy, the sloop 
being under sail." 

I like the last touch, the slaver captain who 
copied out his letters so that they should be neat 
when he had time and was not ashamed to own it, 
I hope he was as careful of his human cargo. 

The getting of that cargo was not always accom- 
plished, as Phillips did it, by the simple process of 
going to the " trunk " and buying those he wanted. 
Clarkson, when he was seeking evidence to justify 
the suppression of the slave trade, told a tale of 



INIQUITOUS DOINGS AT CALABAR 103 

wicked treachery by white men, Englishmen, I am 
sorry to say, who found trade bad at Old Calabar. 

There lay in the River the ships Indian Queen, 
Duke of York, Nancy and Concord of Bristol, the 
Edgar of Liverpool, and the Canterbury of London, 
slavers all, and the slaves were not coming in in 
this year 1767. Therefore they planned among them- 
selves as coolly as if the black men had been deer 
or elephants, or pheasants, how they might best fill 
their between decks. The Calabar River is hot and 
it is unhealthy, for the percentage of moisture in the 
air is so great that very gladly I have sat over a 
fire when the thermometer registered Over 90° in the 
shade, so that it is hardly a pleasant place of 
residence for a white man. Also the old inhabitants 
were not very tender of each other, or very careful 
of human life, for as I sat there watching a most 
glorious sunset a woman, who had come there in the 
early days, and she was not then, I think, fifty, told 
me how she hated to walk along the shore — the 
Calabar River is really an arm of the sea — because 
of the living sacrifices, generally young girls offered 
to the envious gods and bound to stakes, waiting 
for the tide to come up and put an end to their 
misery. Still the blood-thirstiness of the natives 
does not excuse that of the slavers. I only mention 
it because I find that while " the advocates for 
slavery painted the slave in the blackest colours, the 
opponents generally depicted the poor black man as 
a noble martyr. He wasn't. He was suffering 
humanity neither better nor worse than his station 
in life allowed, often rising to heights of heroism, but 
often out-heroding his tormentors in blackguardism. 

It happened there was a quarrel at that time 
between Old and New Calabar, and the captains 
of the vessels, says Clarkson, "joined in sending 



104 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

several letters to the inhabitants of Old Town, but 
particularly to Ephraim Robin John who was at that 
time a grandee of the place. The tenor of these 
letters was that they were sorry that any jealousy 
or quarrel should subsist between the two parties ; 
that if the inhabitants of Old Town would come 
on board, they would afford them security and 
protection ; adding at the same time that their 
intention in inviting them was that they might 
become mediators and thus heal their disputes. The 
inhabitants of Old Town, happy to find their differ- 
ences were likely to be accommodated, joyfully accepted 
the invitation. The three brothers of the grandee 
just mentioned, the eldest of whom was Amboe 
Robin John, first entered their canoe, attended by 
twenty-seven others, and being followed by nine 
canoes, directed their course to the Indian Queen. 
They were dispatched from thence the next morning 
to the Edgar, and afterwards to the Duke of York. 

They went on board the last ship, leaving their 
canoe and attendants by the side of the vessel. 
These, of course, were important men. A chief on 
the Coast now carries a silver-headed stick as a 
badge of rank, is clad in the richest silken robe, 
and is as far above the rank and file as is the 
Duke of Devonshire above the labourer cleaning 
Piccadilly. And these men of rank being well 
received and feted on board the slavers, the rest of 
the canoes went with confidence to the other ships 
of the fleet. And then the white brutes worked 
their wicked will. The men on deck fired on the 
canoe lying alongside, she filled and sank, and the 
wretched attendants were either killed or drowned 
or taken as slaves, while their masters, guests of 
honour in the white man's saloon, fared no better. 
The captain, mates, and some of the crew of the 



THE SLAVE NAMED ECONG 105 

Duke of York, armed with pistols and cutlasses, 
rushed on the unfortunates, doubtless sitting drink- 
ing rum, and they made for the stern windows; 
but they were wounded and helpless and were 
promptly put in irons. 

The Duke of York having given the signal, most 
of the other ships followed her example, and the 
inhabitants of New Town, concealed in the mangrove 
swamps along the shore, where the monkeys play 
and the grey parrots call, came out of their hiding- 
places and joined in the ghastly fray. And the lust 
of killing got hold of the aggressors. The ships' 
boats were manned, and joined themselves to the 
canoes from New Town. They pursued the fleeing 
men from Old Calabar, and they apparently forgot 
the object for which they had lured these men to the 
ships, and killed at least as many of the men of the 
Old Town as they enslaved. 

And then came a canoe with the principal men 
from New Town to the Duke of York, demanding 
Amboe Robin John, the brother of the "grandee" 
of the rival town. And Amboe Robin John pleaded 
pitifully for his life. He put the palms of his hands 
together and beseeched and prayed his captor not so 
to violate the rights of hospitality. But he spoke to 
deaf ears. The captain of the Duke of York only 
wanted a slave, and the men of New Town offered 
him one, named Econg, in exchange, and they forced 
their enemy into the canoe and struck off his head, 
and the slaver put in his place the man named Econg, 
who, like the thirty pieces of silver traded so long 
ago, was the price of blood. 

Was ever there a more atrocious story of treachery ? 
Nothing happened to those white men whereas when 
a slave struck for liberty in Jamaica — but I have told 
this story just because presently I shall have occasion 



106 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

to tell of slave risings in Jamaica, and if the slaves 
were fiendishly cruel — and they were — nothing can 
exceed the cruelty of the white men who first brought 
them hither. Clarkson says that the deputy town- 
clerk of Bristol, Mr Burges, said that he only knew 
of one captain from the port in the slave trade who 
did not deserve to be hanged. 

Perhaps the fate of those men of Old Calabar, 
whose dead bodies were washed up on the sands 
and caught in the mangrove swamps, was the most 
merciful, for those who were taken on board the 
ships truly had a terrible time. From the very 
beginning the last thing the slavers considered was 
the comfort of the slaves. No, " comfort " is the wrong 
word to use, such a word as comfort from the days 
of Queen Elizabeth to those of Victoria, was a word 
not in the language as far as the slaves were con- 
cerned. No one ever thought to see that these men 
and women, these living beings, to put them on the 
very lowest rung of the ladder, were likely to be free 
from discomfort, nay, free from actual pain. Spear 
tells how he read of " the new slaver built at Warren 
in the country of Bristole in the colony of Rhode 
Island, that was three feet ten inches between decks," 
and Clarkson, who went up and down the country 
collecting information about the slavers and their 
doings, tells us of two little sloops which were fitting 
out for Africa, the one only of 25 tons which was 
said to be destined to carry seventy, and the other of 
only 11 tons which was to carry thirty slaves, and 
these were not to be used as tenders bringing small 
parties down the rivers to the bigger ships, but were 
to sail for the West Indies with the slaves themselves, 
and on their arrival, one if not both, were to be sold 
as pleasure boats. Then he gives the dimensions. 
In the larger one each slave " must sit down all the 



THE DIMENSIONS OF A SLAVER 107 

voyage, and contract his limbs within the narrow 
limits of 3 square feet, while in the smaller, each 
slave had 4 square feet to sit in, but since the height 
between decks was only 2 feet 8 inches, his head 
must touch the deck above. When the matter was 
investigated in Parliament, it was stated that if the 
space between decks in a slaver reached 4 feet — 
it never seems to have exceeded 5 feet 8 inches — 
they invariably put up a shelf to the width of 5 feet, 
so that another layer of slaves might be placed on top 
of the first. The men were ironed together two and 
two by the ankles, and sometimes their wrists were 
handcuffed together, and a chain usually fastened the 
irons to ringbolts, either on the deck above or below. 
The women and children were left unironed, and the 
men were stowed forward and the women aft. If 
they could get a cargo — and they generally waited 
on that sweltering coast, rolling in the surf, until they 
did — the slaves covered the entire deck." In Parlia- 
ment, at the end of the eighteenth century, they took 
the dimensions of the slaver Brookes, picking her at 
haphazard from a long list of slavers given them. 
They found that if each man was allowed 6 feet by 
1 foot 4 inches, every woman 5 feet by 1 foot 4 inches, 
every boy 5 feet by 1 foot 2 inches, and every girl 
4 feet 6 inches by 1 foot, they could stow in her 432. 
There is a plan given in Clarkson's book with every 
slave in place, and you could not put a pin between 
them. Certainly it was utterly impossible for any 
one to move amongst them, at least I should have 
said so. And yet it was proved that on a previous 
voyage the Brookes had carried no less than 609 
slaves ! And the slave ships were on the coast, the 
stifling Guinea Coast, from three to ten months, and 
from six to ten weeks crossing the Atlantic. It was 
quite possible for a slave to be on board in that 



108 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

ghastly stinking slave deck, stinking is a mild word 
to use for so foul a den, for over a year. In this 
place they must stay for at least sixteen hours out of 
the twenty-four, when the weather was bad, or even 
when it was wet, they were kept there for days 
together. Nothing that breathed, it seems to me, 
but must have died in such a place. It was stated 
in Parliament that "if the ship was full their situation 
was terribly distressing. They sometimes drew their 
breath with anxious and laborious efforts, and some 
died of suffocation." 

" Thus crammed together like herrings in a barrel," 
said Sir William Dolben, "they contracted putrid 
and fatal disorders, so that they who came to inspect 
them," (how could they inspect them save by tramping 
over them), "in the morning had occasionally to pick 
dead slaves out of their rows, and to unchain their 
carcases from the bodies of their wretched fellow 
sufferers to whom they had been fastened." 

We do well to remember too, that there were no 
sanitary arrangements upon a slave ship. All the 
calls of Nature had to be performed upon the spot 
to which the wretched beings were shackled. And 
when they were sea sick 

But no words of mine can convey the horror of it. 

These unhappy people were allowed a pint of 
water a day each, and were fed twice a day upon 
yams and horse beans. Also, since it was absolutely 
necessary that they should have exercise for their 
health's sake, they were obliged after each meal to 
jump up and down, or dance in their shackles, and if 
they did not do so — I can imagine they hardly felt 
inclined for that form of amusement — they were 
whipped until they did, and the same stimulus was 
used to make them sing ! 

And yet it was possible to arrive at their final 



THE STORY OF THE ZONG 109 

destination with only the loss of 1 or 2 per cent., and 
Captain Hugh Crow, the one-eyed slaver of Liverpool, 
says Spear, by daily washings, good food, and keeping 
them amused by playing on musical instruments, did 
it, and one, Captain John Newton, returned thanks 
in church, because he had performed the voyage from 
Africa without the loss of a single man. 

But these were in the days when the trade was 
counted, according to John Newton, "genteel employ- 
ment," when the rich ship owners of Liverpool and 
Bristol had no more shame in owning slavers than 
nowadays they have in taking passengers to America, 
or trading to Sicily for oranges and wine. 

But care such as Hugh Crow took was, I am 
afraid, rare, and terrible are the tales of the utter 
brutality suffered in addition to the overcrowding, 
the filth and the agonies of seasickness which already 
was the lot of the human cattle. 

Clarkson tells the story of the ship Zong — 
Captain Luke Collingwoocl, and Captain Luke Colling- 
wood seems to have been a devil incarnate. Unluckily, 
he was not the only one in the trade. 

On one day early in September 1781, the Zong 
sailed from the island of St Thomas, bound for 
Jamaica, with 440 slaves on board, and she arrived 
off the coast short of water. But Collingwoocl 
made the mistake of thinking "he was off Hayti, 
and seeing that the slaves were sickly, and indeed 
had suffered much from want of water, he and 
his mate, James Kelsall, decided that since the 
slaves were sickly — sickly was probably a mild 
term to use since sixty of them had already died — 
it would be well to jettison the cargo, or some of it. 
For the death rate had been so great the voyage 
was likely to be unprofitable, and if he could prove 
that some of the cargo had been thrown overboard 



110 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

to save the rest, the underwriters would pay the 
value of it, while if these slaves died on board the 
ship would be at the loss. They selected accordingly 
132 of the most sickly of the slaves. Fifty-four 
of these were there and then thrown overboard to 
the sharks that swarmed round the ship, and forty- 
two went the same way the next day, and in the 
course of the next three days the remaining twenty- 
six were brought out of the den below to complete 
the tale of the victims. Poor, wretched, suffering 
creatures ! They looked at the sea, at the sinister 
fins appearing above the oily swell, and they looked 
back at their prison and the pitiless white faces 
that looked clown upon them, and then they made 
their choice. Sixteen, they say, were thrown over- 
board by the officers, but the rest leaped into the 
bloody sea where the sharks were already fighting 
for their meal and shared their fate. 

The plea that was set up on behalf of this 
atrocious act of wickedness was that the captain 
discovered, when he made the proposal, that he had 
only 200 gallons of water on board, and that he 
had missed his port. It was proved, however, in 
answer to this that no one had been put upon 
short allowance ; and that rain fell and continued 
for three days immediately after the second lot of 
slaves had been thrown overboard. They might 
have filled all their barrels and done away with all 
necessity — if one could call it necessity — for the 
murder of the third lot. As a matter of fact they 
only troubled to fill six. 

But the underwriters refused to pay, and the 
Solicitor- General actually held that the captain of 
the ship had an " unquestionable right" to throw 
the slaves into the sea. But not all men agreed 
with him. Light was coming, and Lord Mansfield, 



THE CASE OF THE GLORIA 111 

presiding in the higher court, said that this was 
a shocking case, and, in spite of the law, decided 
in favour of the underwriters. Still, nothing 
apparently was done to the murderers. They went 
scot-free. But imagine the state of public opinion 
when such a case could actually be brought before 
the courts, when the perpetrators of such a crime 
evidently regarded themselves as agents, doing their 
very best for those who had entrusted their business 
to their charge. 

But once the trade was outlawed, and the 
vigilant warships were ever on the watch, life was 
still more cruel for the unfortunate chattel. Then, 
to run as many slaves as possible, and to make 
up for possible losses, the slaves were compelled 
to lie on their sides, breast to back, spoon fashion, 
and this when the space between decks was less 
than two feet. When it was as much as two feet they 
were stowed, says Spear, " sitting up in rows, one 
crowded into the lap of another, with legs on legs 
like riders on a crowded toboggan. In storms the 
sailors had to put on the hatches, and seal tight 
the openings into the infernal cesspool. It was 
asserted by the naval officers who were stationed 
on the Coast to stop the traffic that in certain states 
of the weather they could detect the odour of a 
slaver farther away than they "could see her on 
a clear night. The odour was often unmistakable 
at a distance of five miles down the wind." 

And to what lengths these brutes might go we 
may see in the case of the Gloria, given by Drake 
in his Revelations of a Slave Smuggle!', and quoted 
by Spear. The surgeon tells the tale. 

The Gloria was coming from the Cape Verde 
Islands in ballast when she overhauled a Portuguese 
schooner with a full cargo of slaves. The captain 



112 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

of the Gloria, as thorough a scoundrel surely as 
ever sailed the seas, filled up his men with rum, 
attacked the schooner, murdered her officers and 
crew and one passenger, stole the gold, transferred 
the slaves to his own ship and scuttled the other. 
Dead men and sunken ships tell no tales, and 190 
slaves as witnesses counted as naught in those 
days. 

Then Ruiz the captain, I'm glad he wasn't an 
Englishman, bought 400 negroes on the Dahomean 
Coast and "hauled our course for the Atlantic 
voyage. But this was to be my last trip in the 
blood-stained Gloria. Hardly were we out a fort- 
night before it was discovered that our roystering 
crew had neglected to change the sea water, which 
had served as our ballast in the lower casks, and 
which ought to have been replaced with fresh water 
in Africa. We were drawing from the last casks 
before this discovery was made, and the horror of 
our situation sobered Captain Ruiz. He gave orders 
to hoist the precious remnant abaft the main grating, 
and made me calculate how long it would sustain 
the crew and cargo. I found that half a gill a day 
would hold out to the Spanish main ; and it was 
decided that, in order to save our cargo, we should 
allow the slaves a half gill and the crew a gill each 
a day. Then began a torture worse than death to 
the blacks. Pent in their close dungeons, to the 
number of nearly five hundred, they suffered continual 
torment. Our crew and drivers were unwilling to 
allow even the half gill per diem, and quarrelled 
fiercely over their own stinted rations. Our cargo 
had been stowed on the platforms closer than I 
ever saw slaves stowed before, or since. Instead 
of lowering buckets of water to them, as was 
customary, it became necessary to pour the water 



THE DEATH MIST 113 

into half-pint measures. These farthest from the 
gratings never got a drop. ... In a short time at 
least a hundred men and women were shackled to 
dead partners." 

It is a ghastly picture. Perhaps we could not 
expect any pity for the sufferings of the "cargo" 
from such a set of pirates. Everyone who was free 
on board drank hard "as well as myself," said the 
frank narrator, and they did not trouble to throw the 
dead overboard, or presumably even to unshackle 
the living, for the captain finding his crew out of 
hand, ordered the hatches down, and "swore he 
would make the run on our regular water rations, 
and take the chances of his stock." 

Three days those fiends continued their course, 
drinking in plenty, while " the negroes suffo- 
cated below." And then came retribution swift 
and sure. 

"Ruiz and four of the men were taken suddenly 
ill with a disease that baffled my medical knowledge. 
Their tongues swelled and grew black ; their flesh 
turned yellow, and in six hours they were dead. 
The first mate went next, and then three others of 
the crew, and a black driver whose body became 
leprous with yellow spots. I began to notice a 
strange fetid smell pervading the vessel, and a low 
heavy fog on deck, almost like" steam. Then the 
horrid truth became apparent. Our rotting negroes 
under hatches had generated the plague, and it was 
a malaria or death mist I saw rising. At this time 
all our men but three and myself had been attacked ; 
and we abandoned the Gloria in her long boat, taking 
the remnant of water, a sack of biscuit, and a rum 
beaker, with what gold dust and other valuables we 
could hastily gather up. We left nine of our late 
comrades dead and five dying on the Glorias deck." 



114 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

I have only read the extract that Spear gives in 
his book, but if it is true — and it may well be — ■ 
judging by what I have read elsewhere — this ship's 
surgeon appears to have been a pretty considerable 
villain himself. The "cargo," I suppose, must have 
been dead. It was hardly likely one could have sur- 
vived so long without water in the tropics, but what 
about the dying comrades he abandoned on the decks ? 

As a matter of fact, the slavers themselves often 
did so suffer, for it is hardly possible to generate 
disease, live over it, and escape scot-free. One of 
the most ghastly cases is that of the French slaver 
Rodeur. 

In the year in which Queen Victoria was born, 
she was on her way to the West Indies with 162 
slaves, when ophthalmia appeared among them. 
Probably it was not treated properly, but in any 
case, crowded as they were between decks, it was 
bound to spread rapidly, and at last, the captain with 
a view to saving the majority repeated the horror of 
the Zong, and threw thirty-six of them, the ones 
of least value, I presume, alive to the sharks. But 
this living sacrifice did not stop the disease. As it 
was bound to, being a filth disease, it spread to the 
crew, and presently there was but one man among 
the crew who could see. And this one man steering, 
and with all the work of the ship upon his shoulders, 
saw with thankfulness a sail, and steered towards 
her. But there was something strange about that 
sail. As he approached the ship he saw she was 
drifting as if derelict, though men were wandering 
about her decks. And she, too, was a slaver. On 
the Rodeur they might have known that by the smell, 
if custom had not deadened in them that sense. In 
answer to a hail the crew of the stranger came 
crowding to the rail begging, praying for aid, and 



FOREDOOMED TO FAILURE 115 

everyone on board that ship was blind. She was, 
they said, the Spanish slaver Leon, and among their 
slaves, too, ophthalmia had broken out, and had 
spread to the crew, and there they lay rolling on the 
Atlantic helpless. 

But what was the good of prayers and cries, and 
bribes, and wild appeals for help. One man who 
could see had as much as he could do to steer his 
own ship to port, for the disease was creeping upon 
him, and tradition says that he, too, went blind when 
he reached haven, and of the Spanish slaver Leon, 
with all her crew and all her slaves, no man ever 
heard again. 

But the white men, at least, took the risks with 
their eyes open ; upon the blacks, it had been forced, 
and no wonder the wretched cargo in their hopeless 
misery tried rebelling, though rebellion meant death 
to all concerned, and often, to some who had 
absolutely nothing to do with it. 

Take the story told by the surgeon of the slaver 
Little Pearl, which sailed from the Coast in 1786. 
The chief mate used to beat the men slaves in season 
and out of season. One night he heard a noise and 
jumped down amongst them with a lantern. On the 
Brookes there wouldn't have been room for a lantern, 
and I doubt if there was more on the Little 
Pearl. Two of the slaves forced themselves out of 
their irons, and seizing him, began to strike him 
with these, their only weapons. His cries brought 
the crew to his aid, we can imagine how mercilessly 
they trampled on the slaves in that confined space to 
do it, and they got him out, and the "cargo" began 
one of those hopeless struggles for freedom which 
could only end one way. At least, as a rule, it did. 
They were still on tjie Coast, and the thought that 
they were near their homes, probably gave added 



116 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

vigour to the arms of those who fought. The crew 
fired down upon them, careless of whom they might 
hurt. In truth, there was hardly anything else they 
could do, for, if the slaves got the upper hand, 
it would have been "Good-night," as far as the 
white men were concerned. Next morning they 
were brought up one by one, and then it was found 
a boy had been killed. Only the two men who had 
first broken their bonds did not come with the others. 
They found their way into the hold, and armed them- 
selves with knives from a cask that had been opened 
for trade. Oh, the forlorn hope ! If they had been 
white men someone would have enthused over their 
pluck and valour, but they were only two negro 
slaves. One was persuaded to come up by a negro 
trader calling to him in his own tongue, and the 
moment he appeared on deck, one of the crew, 
"supposing him to be yet hostile," shot him dead. 
The other held that hold for twelve hours ! They 
mixed scalding water with fat and poured it down 
upon him to make him come up, but, "though his 
flesh was painfully blistered," by these means he kept 
below. A promise was then made to him in the 
African tongue by the same trader that no injury 
should be done him if he would come amongst them. 
To this at length he consented. But, on observing 
when he was about half way up that a sailor was 
armed between decks, he flew to him and threw him 
down. The sailor fired his pistol in the scuffle, but, 
without effect ; he contrived, however, to fracture his 
skull with the butt end of it, so that the slave died 
on the third day. Mercifully. Though we are left 
in the dark as to his sufferings before he died, but we 
may judge of them by the way the same men treated 
a boy when they arrived at their destination in the 
West Indies. 



A SICK SLAVE 117 

There was a boy slave on board, says ClarksoD, 
who was very ill and emaciated. Now the rule in 
slavers was that each officer of the ship was allowed 
one or more slaves for his own benefit, according to 
his rank. But the slaves were not given to them. 
When they were sold, the total amount brought in 
was added together and then divided by the number 
of slaves sold, and in that way each officer took his 
share in money. Therefore, if a slave were sold for 
a trifling amount, he brought down the value of the 
officers' slaves. The chief mate objected to this boy 
being sold. He would only bring down the average. 
His objection was allowed. It was a natural one. 
Therefore, the boy was kept on board, and not 
exposed for sale, but no provisions were allowed him, 
and the mate suggested he should be thrown over- 
board. No one would do this, however, though they 
could quite easily watch him starving to death before 
their eyes. And starve he did, and on the ninth 
day died, "having never been allowed any sustenance 
during that time." And this in a tropical island 
where the fruits of the earth could be bought for the 
merest trifle. It seems impossible that men should 
have been so fiendishly cruel, but the evidence is 
overwhelming. The times were hard, and we know 
that Wilberforce, who championed so well the slave, 
turned a deaf ear to the sufferings of the British 
labourer. Still, two wrongs do not make a right, and, 
without doubt, the black people stolen away for 
slaves were treated by many with a whole-hearted 
callousness that is hard to believe in these times. 

They had all sorts of means of coercion. Clarkson 
found openly exposed for sale, in a shop in Liverpool, 
the handcuffs and the leg irons with which one slave 
was shackled to another, also a thumbscrew, and an 
instrument like a brutal pair of scissors with screws 

i 



118 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

at the end instead of looped handles. This was 
pushed in a mouth obstinately kept shut, tearing 
lips and breaking teeth, then forcibly opened and 
kept open with a screw, so that the unfortunate who 
wished to end his miseries by starvation might be fed. 

That this was used fairly often there is no doubt. 
There is the testimony of Captain Frazer, accounted 
one of the most humane men in the trade. It had 
been said of him that he had held hot coals to the 
mouth of a recalcitrant slave to compel him to eat. 
He was questioned on this point but he denied it, 
and presently — I am telling the tale as the great 
abolitionist told it — the true story came out. 

"Being sick in my cabin, I was informed that a 
man slave would neither eat, drink, nor speak. I 
desired the mate and surgeon to try and persuade 
him to speak. I desired that the slaves might try 
also. When I found he was still obstinate, not 
knowing whether it was from sulkiness or insanity, 
I ordered a person to present him with a piece of 
fire in one hand and a piece of yam in the other, 
and to tell me what effect this had upon him. I 
learned that he took the yam and began to eat it, 
but he threw the fire overboard." 

These were the tender mercies of the kind. Few 
slaves could expect so much consideration. 

There was a slave ship once struck on Morant 
Keys, not far from the east end of Jamaica — again 
I get my information from Clarkson. The crew, 
taking care of their own skins, landed in their boats 
with arms and provisions, and with incredible brutality 
— save that nothing a slaver did would now strike 
me as incredible — left the slaves on board still in 
their irons. This was in the night ; and when morning 
broke they saw that the slaves, who must have been 
capable men, had not only managed to get free, but 



FLOTSAM AND JETSAM 119 

were busy making rafts on which they placed the 
women and children, swimming themselves beside 
the rafts, and guiding them as they drifted towards 
the island whereon were the crew. They should 
have been hailed as heroes and helped, but the crew 
were afraid — whether rightly or wrongly I cannot 
say. Certainly you could hardly expect men who 
had been left heavily ironed to drown, to deal very 
tenderly with the men who had calmly acquiesced 
in their death. At any rate, the story goes the white 
men feared, not that the black men would attack 
them, but that they would consume the water and 
provisions that had been landed. They resolved 
to destroy them as they approached the shore, and 
they killed between three and four hundred; and 
out of the whole cargo only thirty-three were saved 
to be brought to Kingston and sold. 

To me it is a strange thing that I cannot explain 
to myself, that our pity is more easily aroused by the 
story of one individual case than by the tale of 
suffering in the mass. It was an awful thing to 
leave those helpless people confined and shackled, 
and at the mercy of the winds and waves ; it was 
still worse to shoot them down when by their own 
pluck and intrepidity they had succeeded in saving 
themselves. There were little children amongst them, 
and they too must have been shot down ; they too 
must have raised despairing little hands to brutes 
who knew not the meaning of the word pity. But 
somehow even that, terrible as it is, pales before the 
conduct of a brutal slaver, the last I shall tell of the 
many brutalities of the Middle Passage. It Mas told 
in Parliament at the end of the eighteenth century, 
told probably reluctantly, for much of the evidence 
was dragged out of unwilling witnesses who feared 
for themselves. They were surgeons, or ships' officers, 



120 THE MIDDLE PASSAGE 

or seamen, and their livelihood depended upon their 
keeping in with captains and shipowners. 

There was a baby of ten months old, a chubby 
little round-faced helpless thing. It "took sulk and 
would not eat," Clarkson puts it. How should it eat 
when what it wanted was milk, and what it got was 
rice or pulse, poor baby. And that tiny child that 
brutal monster flogged with a "cat," swearing he 
would make it eat or kill it. " From this and other 
ill-treatment," says Clarkson, not specifying the ill- 
treatment, " the child's legs swelled. He then ordered 
some water to be made hot to abate the swelling. 
But even his tender mercies were cruel, for the cook, 
putting his hand in the water, said it was too hot. 
Upon this the captain swore at him, and ordered the 
feet to be put in. This was done. The nails and skin 
came off. Oiled cloths were then put round them." 
And then, as if that were not enough, the child was 
tied to a heavy log, and apparently the brute who 
had charge of his destinies forgot all about it for 
a little while. It must have eaten something, perhaps 
its mother had a little, for the captain did not notice 
it for two or three days ; then its pitiful crying, I 
suppose, called his attention to it, and he "caught 
it up again and repeated that he would make it 
eat or kill it. He immediately flogged it again, and 
in a quarter of an hour it died." 

Now I am aware that cases of individual cruelty 
may happen at any time in any place. But against 
that is the fact that this brutality was committed 
openly upon the deck of the slaver, the officers and 
crew saw it, and not one of them raised a hand to 
help a helpless baby who was being cruelly done to 
death. More — when the story came out nothing was 
done to the man who has left such a memorial behind 
him, and no one seemed surprised at this. 



THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE 121 

I apologise for this chapter, it is so full of 
horrors. But seeing the people who have made 
Jamaica their own, writing about them I am of 
necessity compelled to tell the whole story, for it 
seems to me they cannot be properly understood — 
their kindliness, their subserviency, their cheerfulness, 
even their insolence and their dishonesty' — unless we 
examine the way in which their forbears first came 
to Jamaica. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PLANTATION 

I can hardly say it too often — in reading about the 
slaves and their sufferings we must remember that 
past ages had different standards, and that, although 
undoubtedly the slaves suffered horribly it was the 
custom of the times, and other people suffered as 
well. Even at the beginning of this century, coming 
to England from a land where the working man 
could always make enough to keep himself in decency 
and comfort, I was shocked and horrified at the 
condition of the poorer classes in the great cities of 
England. In London, in Liverpool, in the Five 
Towns, and more particularly in Sheffield, was I 
dismayed at the low standard of the working man 
or woman. It seemed to me they were slaves in 
a bitter cold and cheerless country, and as far as 
I could see, for I had my living to earn and no time 
to investigate, they had no hope of bettering their 
condition. 

And my Australian eyes were not the only ones 
that saw the people so. E. Nesbit, who writes so 
charmingly, once wrote a story in which the children, 
either by means of a magic carpet or a reanimated 
phoenix, brought back Queen Semiramis to visit the 
earth and took her for a ride on top of an omnibus 
through the London streets. 

" How badly you keep your slaves ? " said the 
Queen. 



THE ARRIVAL OF A SLAVE SHIP 123 

"Oh, there are no slaves in England," said the 
children. I quote from memory but this is the gist 
of the story. 

" Stuff and nonsense, children ! " said the Queen. 
"Don't tell me! Think I don't know a slave when 
I see him ! " 

E. Nesbit is quite right. "We cannot see fairly 
and in their true colours the things to which use 
has deadened our sensibilities. It must have seemed 
quite natural for the planters of Jamaica to be pleased 
when a slave ship arrived. The news would go 
round at once, and as the ships were not very big 
they came to ports that only a coaster visits nowadays. 
To Kingston, of course, to Montego Bay, but they 
also went to Savanna la Mar and to Black River and 
other places that dream idly in the sunshine now 
and get their stores by motor boats and schooners. 

Probably the planter grumbled and growled and 
said the stench of such a ship was enough to knock 
you down, and that he hated the job, but he had 
to have hands, and in a way he enjoyed the outing 
and the gathering together of his own kind. No 
one, I think, for one moment thought of the sufferings 
of the slaves ; they grumbled, as men do nowadays 
because a pig-stye smells. Occasionally a farmer, 
wiser than the rest, declares the swine should be 
kept clean, but one and all, grumblers and wise men, 
are sure they need bacon. And so it was with the 
sale of the black cattle. 

They were savages. Occasionally, perhaps, a 
highly bred and educated man from the north might 
be mixed up with them, but as a rule the slaves 
imported were the merest barbarians. It is no good 
thinking they were anything else. It is true enough 
what the advocates of slavery always maintained, 
that through their enslaving they did get a glimpse 



124 THE PLANTATION 

of better things. An Ashanti woman with her shaven 
head and a cloth wrapped round her middle, beating 
fu-fu, is certainly not as far advanced in the social 
scale as the milkmaid clambering down the steep 
hillside to Montego Bay and saving her pennies to 
buy herself smart clothes in which to go to church. 
But it is also certain that the men who imported her 
forbears were thinking only of their own convenience. 

There was a tremendous cleaning up on board 
on arrival ; salt water was aplenty, and the slaves 
were doctored, their sores were attended to, and they 
were given palm oil and coconut oil with which 
to anoint themselves. They must have been thankful 
to come out of their cramped quarters and bask on 
deck in the sunshine, but they must have feared. 
One historian has left it on record that the planters 
who came down to buy had often celebrated the 
arrival and were so gloriously drunk that the 
scramble for the goods was disgraceful and the 
unfortunate Helots must have thought they had fallen 
into the hands of cannibals and were to be despatched 
forthwith. 

The planters, when they were able, visited the 
ships to see the new importations and decide for 
which they should bid at the coming sale, but in 
later times the slaves were taken straight to the 
vendue master and sold in the public slave market. 
There used to be a large slave market at Montego 
Bay, quite close to the water, so that the merchandise 
might be rowed ashore, and the gentlemen from 
Success and Contentment and Retrieve, from Iron 
Shore and Retirement and True Friendship — thus they 
name plantations in Jamaica — came crowding to fill 
up the gaps in their hands, to buy Madam a serving 
wench, or young master a boy to wait upon him. 

They stood there in rows, naked savages, men and 



THE SLAVE MARKET 125 

women with clean cloths round their loins, and boys 
and girls stark. Their shackles had generally been 
struck off because a quiet and peaceable slave was 
more valued than one who had to be kept in restraint. 
There were shade trees growing round the market- 
place, and the sun nickered down through their leaves 
and made patterns on the shapely dark bodies, and 
the buyers examined them exactly as they would have 
examined a horse or a cow they wanted to buy. 

The buyers had certain preferences. In spite of 
an evil reputation, "the Koromantyns," says Bryan 
Edwards, "are distinguished from all others by 
firmness both of body and mind, a ferociousness 
of disposition ; but withal, activity, courage, and 
stubbornness," and this, while it made them 
dangerous, made them good labourers. The Papams 
or Whidahs, those who came from the coasts between 
Accra and all along by Keta and Togoland and 
Dahomey, "are accounted most docile." The Eboes 
from Calabar and the swamps round the mouths 
of the Niger "were valued the least, being feeble, 
timid, despairing creatures, who not infrequently 
used to commit suicide in their dejection," which 
perhaps was not surprising if they could not work 
and knew what they had to expect if they did not. 

The people from the Gaboon country, at the 
bottom of the Gulf of Guinea, were said to be in- 
variably ill-disposed, and lastly, those from the Congo 
and farther south from the coasts of Angola, though 
counted less robust than the other negroes, were 
more handy as mechanics, and more trustworthy. 
So the gentlemen, crowding to the sales, had some 
idea of the quality of the goods they had come to buy. 

The value of a slave increased as the years went 
on. In 1689, I believe, a slave could be bought for 
£7, but of course £7 was a great deal more money 



126 THE PLANTATION 

then than it is now. Then a good negro rose to £20. 
In 1750 a planter writes, "Bought ten negroes at 
£50 each " — which, Edwards says, was the common 
price in 1791 ; boys and girls cost from £40 to £45, 
while an infant was worth £5. After that they rose 
in value rapidly, and before Edwards had finished 
his history in his estimate of the expenses of a sugar 
plantation, he values the negroes at £70 apiece ; while 
in 1832, just before the Emancipation, when the 
planters expected compensation for the loss of their 
labour, the value of a slave sometimes rose as high as 
£110 per man. 

Because of the perquisites of the officers, only the 
healthy slaves were offered for sale at first, but the 
sick, injured, and weakly were by no means wasted. 
Indeed, even in those hard-bitten times, the disposal 
of the sickly slaves was often considered a scandal. 
They were generally bought up by speculators who 
sometimes tended them, sometimes did not, simply 
made what they could out of them. If the lot of the 
healthy slaves was hard, that of the newly arrived 
and sickly was terrible, till death released them from 
their sufferings. And in every ship we may be sure 
there were sick. 

I do not find any record of slave risings on the 
arrival of the ships. It seems as if the black men, 
dazed and frightened, unaccustomed to their new 
surroundings, submitted quietly enough. It was not 
until they were on the estates, had time to look 
round them, had hoes and knives and machetes put 
into their hands, that they realised the comparative 
weakness of the whites, and the chance they had of 
freedom. They might be met any day, a band of 
stalwart black savages clad only in loin cloths, the 
women, apart with their babies seated on their hips, 
leading older children by the hand, marching along 



DUMB SAVAGES 127 

the white roads, clambering up the steep mountain 
paths to the estate that was to be their destination, 
with a white man on horseback following slowly, 
and one, or two, or three black drivers, according to 
the number of the new slaves, with whips, old slaves 
who could be trusted, marshalling them. Sometimes 
they sang, and always they went better to some sort 
of music, but I do not think they were often very 
rebellious. The first bitterness of the enslavement 
had passed. Here was solid ground beneath their 
feet again, a companion they were accustomed to, 
beside them, pleasant sunshine and a cooling breeze, 
and it might be worth their while to see what the 
future held for them. 

Arrived at the estate, the newcomers were very 
often handed over individually to some slave accus- 
tomed to the plantation, who showed them the ropes, 
and possibly heard tales of the country from which 
he had been torn long ago. 

They were practically dumb these first comers. 
They did not understand the language ; even the old 
hands only grasped the words of command, and 
though they thoroughly understood the uses to which 
a knife might be put, a hoe they would certainly 
regard as a woman's implement. 

Of course their masters took no heed of that, any 
more than they considered the slave's feelings when 
they made over a fierce Ashanti or Mendi warrior to 
a mild Joloff, or gave a Mandingo from the north, 
who was likely to be a Mohammedan and might even 
be able to read and write Arabic, into the charge of 
an Eboe, who was a savage pure and simple, and 
probably remained a savage after years of plantation 
labour. To do them justice, I expect these gentlemen 
from Amity, or Rose Hall, or Good Hope, had about 
as much idea of the map of Africa as I have of the 



128 THE PLANTATION 

contour of the Antarctic Continent — less very likely ; 
and that these people were separated as widely by 
the countries of their birth as they themselves were 
from England, never occurred to them. I don't 
suppose they would have bothered if it had. But 
certain differences were forced upon them. And for 
the proper working of their plantations, they must 
needs take note of those differences. As a rule, they 
were not intentionally cruel, but they regarded the 
slaves as chattels. 

There is a story told by Bryan Edwards, to 
illustrate the superior pluck of the Koromantyns, 
but it also shows us the standing of a slave very 
well indeed :■ — 

"A gentleman of my acquaintance who had 
purchased at the same time ten Koromantyn boys, 
and the like number of Eboes, the eldest of the 
whole apparently not more than thirteen years of age 
— caused them all to be collected and brought before 
him in my presence to be marked on the breast. 
This operation is performed by heating a small silver 
brand, composed of one or two letters, in the flame 
of spirits of wine, and applying it to the skin which 
is previously anointed with sweet oil. The applica- 
tion is instantaneous and the pain momentary." So 
Mr Bryan Edwards but he was in no danger from a 
branding iron. " Nevertheless, it may be easily sup- 
posed that the apparatus must have a frightful appear- 
ance to a child. Accordingly, when the first boy, who 
happened to be one of the Eboes, and the stoutest of 
the whole, was led forward to receive the mark, he 
screamed dreadfully, while his companions of the 
same nation manifested strong emotions of sympa- 
thetic terror. The gentleman stopped his hand. But 
the Koromantyn boys, laughing aloud, and immedi- 
ately coming forward of their own accord, offered 



THE BRAND 129 

their bosoms undauntedly to the brand, and receiving 
its impression without flinching in the least, snapped 
their fingers in exultation over the poor Eboes." 

The natives of Africa are often much worse 
marked than any small silver brand could mark 
them merely by way of ornament, and many a time 
do we see white men who have submitted to the 
more painful operation of tattooing merely for — well, 
when I'm put to it I really don't know why a white 
man allows himself to be tattooed. 

You will find it said that the majority of people 
were good to their slaves, that it was their interest 
to be good to them. True, but unfortunately we 
have only to look round us to see how often 
nowadays a horse, or indeed any helpless creature 
dependent upon some careless man's good- will, is 
ill-used, even though ultimately that ill-usage means 
a loss to the owner. And so it was in Jamaica : 
a man did the best he could for his slaves, his 
favourites were pampered, but when it came to a 
pinch the slaves suffered. There was a terrible 
famine in Jamaica in the latter half of the eighteenth 
century ; England had decreed that there should be 
no trade with her revolted colonies, supplies were 
therefore more restricted than they need have been, 
and it is recorded that the slaves died by thousands. 
Again and again we are told liow, even in normal 
times, the slave spent his midday rest hour either 
in the bush picking berries and wild fruits with 
which to supplement his scanty fare, or else in 
searching the rubbish heap at the planters' door for 
gnawed bones which were ground small and boiled 
down to get what sustenance there was in them. 
No one troubled about a slave ; some men would 
get a reputation for ill-treating their slaves, but no 
one thought of interfering. 



130 THE PLANTATION 

Besides, as I have remarked before, the pens and 
estates were so isolated. Anything might have 
happened to a slave on one of those estates, and 
it would have been long before rumour carried the 
tale to the next estate. 

And there was another side of the picture, the 
side at which the planter looked, especially when he 
thought of bringing a wife to his lonely Great House 
set high on a hill-top or a jutting rock. He was 
surrounded by some hundreds of these alien people, 
dumbly resentful of their condition — he didn't put 
it like that — ill-conditioned ruffians he probably called 
them, and he never knew when the worst might not 
influence the rest. And they were armed with 
machetes and knives and hoes and spades, for 
purposes of agriculture certainly, but agricultural 
implements make excellent weapons of offence in 
the hands of a fierce Timini or Krobo warrior. " He 
travels the fastest who travels alone," as Kipling 
sings, and many a man thanked God he had no 
wife or children. 

He took to himself one of the dark women, and 
in later times there were the mulattoes and quadroons 
to be had for the choosing. 

We can easily see why the presence of a white 
woman was resented upon an estate. If the owner 
chose to live with some brown or yellow girl he 
naturally objected to his underlings choosing a mode 
of life which would be a reproach to him, and if 
he brought out a wife all those who had no wives 
felt that Madam exercised an undue espionage over 
their mode of life. 

"In my drive this morning met several of the 
unfortunate half black progeny of some of our staff," 
writes Lady Nugent, "all in fine muslin lace, &c, 
with wreaths of flowers in their hats. What ruin 



THE SLAVE HOUSEKEEPER 131 

for these worse than thoughtless, young men." If 
she wrote thus, she probably did not refrain from 
comment at the time, and doubtless her comment 
was resented. 

"Soon after my arrival," writes Matthew Lewis, 
" I asked my attorney " (an attorney in Jamaica is 
the man who manages the estate for an absentee 
owner) "whether a clever-looking woman who seemed 
to have great authority in the house belonged to me." 

" 'No, she was a free woman.' 

" ' Was she in my service then ? ' 

" ' No, she was not in my service.' I began to 
grow impatient. 

" ' But what does she do at Cornwall ? Of what 
use is she in the house ? ' 

" ' Why, sir, as to use, of great use, sir ' ; and 
then, after a pause, added in a lower voice, 'It is 
the custom, sir, for unmarried men to have house- 
keepers, and Nancy is mine.' " 

Lewis wrote in the second decade of the nineteenth 
century a little after Lady Nugent, and putting all 
these little stories together, we get a complete picture 
of the Jamaican estate as it must have been for close 
on two hundred years. 

The black people, naked at first and later clad 
in rags, lived in a little village some distance from 
the Great House where dwelt their master, and the 
bond between them was the woman he took from 
amongst them for his convenience. The villages were 
of palm-thatched houses with walls of swish or of 
wattle, and were very often surrounded by a wall, 
for if the owner valued his privacy so did the 
dweller in the village, and presently around them 
grew up a grove of trees planted by the negro some- 
times by design, sometimes by accident ; there were 
coconut palms and naseberries, tall leafy trees, and 



132 THE PLANTATION 

by the beginning of the nineteenth century, thanks 
to Bligh and Marshall, breadfruit and mango trees, 
the handsomest trees, perhaps, that bear fruit, and 
there were oranges and lemons with their fragrant 
blossoms. 

"I never witnessed on the stage a scene," says 
Lewis, " so picturesque as a negro village, ... If I 
were to decide according to my own taste I should 
infinitely have preferred their habitations to my own. 
Each house is surrounded by a separate garden, and 
the whole village is intersected by lanes bordered with 
all kinds of sweet-smelling and flowering plants." 
Certainly he was fortunate. The villages on his 
estate must have been model ones. I have been up 
and down the land and I have never seen a negro 
village that in my eyes did not badly need cleaning 
up. There is no reason why the houses should not 
be delightful, but they are not. In those old days, 
the days long before Lewis, they were a danger, 
of course. Of sanitation there was none. Even now 
about a peasant's house in Jamaica there is often 
an unpleasant smell from the rotting waste that is 
scattered around ; then it must have been much worse, 
but what could you expect, when the masters them- 
selves regarded bad smells and rotting waste as all 
in the day's work ? In the old slave-trading castles 
on the Guinea Coast there was always a well in 
the courtyard, a very necessary precaution, surrounded 
as the traders were by hostile tribes, but they also 
buried their dead in the courtyard and it never seems 
to have occurred to them that by such a practice 
they might possibly be arranging for a constant 
supply of graves. Sloane, I think it is, puts it on 
paper that, but for the John Crows — a small vulture 
— he does not think the towns in Jamaica would 
have been habitable. 



THE GROWTH OF PATRIOTISM 133 

The fields where the slaves grew cassava and 
yams and chochos and coeos were usually at some 
distance from the village, "on the mountain," which 
meant the rougher and more stony hill ground at a 
distance from the Great House. According to custom 
one acre of ground was planted for every five negroes, 
and they were allowed to work on it one day a week. 

And very gradually, the descendants of the 
naked savages who had been brought so un- 
willingly came to feel that they belonged to the 
land — it was their country. It was said that all the 
outbreaks were led by the newly-imported slaves, 
and that the Creoles, those born in the colony, were 
contented enough. They had many wrongs, but 
undoubtedly they loved the place of their birth, and 
felt deeply being sent away or sold. They pitied, 
as from a higher plane, the book-keeper who had 
to go. It is curious to learn that when a white 
underling was dismissed, the gangs — these slaves who 
must stay whether they liked it or not — would sing : 

" Massa turn poor buckra away ho ! 
But Massa can't turn poor neger away oh ! " 

We see that they must have looked at their 
position from a different view-point from that we 
naturally take now. 

I have read through two or three books of records 
of such estates as Worthy Park and Rose Hall, and 
in them the slaves are enumerated in exactly the 
same fashion as the cattle on the next page. The 
Worthy Park book I found specially interesting. It 
was an old brown leather-covered book, 18 inches 
long by 1 foot broad, and round it clung — or so it 
seemed to me — an unrestful emanation, as if the men 
who wrote in it were discontented and found life a 
vexatious thing. 

K 



134 THE PLANTATION 

This slave book begins — and the beginning is 
written in a very clear clerkly hand ; I expect my 
grandmother would have placed the writer's status 
exactly— with a description of the lands, 3150 acres, 
held by the original owner of Worthy Park, John 
Price, Esq., of Penzance, England; he was an 
absentee owner, and there is no record in the book 
of his ever having visited his estate. George Doubt 
was the superintendent, and lived at the Great House ; 
but whether it was he who made those first entries, 
there is no means of knowing. He certainly did 
not make them all, for the handwriting varies, and 
there were no less than six overseers in the five 
years, the book records, between 1787 and 1792. 
And the ink and the paper reflect credit on the 
makers, for though browned with time the writing 
is perfectly legible, and the pages are stout still. 

Once the limits of the estate are laid down, we 
come to the stock upon it — the negroes, the mules, 
the horses, the oxen ; and every quarter returns were 
made to the Vestry of the Parish. This, I think, 
because a tax of 6d. a head had to be paid upon 
every slave ; and for the safety of the public a certain 
number of white men had to be kept, capable of 
bearing arms. 

The white men were always changing, with the 
exception of George Doubt, so I conclude either that 
that superintendent was a hard man, or that John 
Price, comfortable in his English home, drove him 
hard : for even for those times the pay seems to 
have been poor. What Doubt got I do not know, 
but the overseer got £200 a year, and of course his 
board and lodging ; the surgeon got £140 per annum ; 
the book-keeper and distiller £50 per annum, and 
the ordinary book-keepers £30 per annum each. It 
was no catch to be a book-keeper in those days. As 



MEN— OR CATTLE 135 

a rule he had nothing to do with books, but he did 
all the little jobs that could not be entrusted to the 
slaves. He served out the corn for the feeding of 
the fowls, kept count of the rats that were killed, 
and went into the cane-fields with the negro drivers. 
He had to be out in the fields so early that his 
breakfast was sent out to him. 

A negro wench, complained a long-suffering 
young man, brought him his breakfast — a bottle of 
cold coffee, two herrings, and a couple of boiled 
plantains stuck on a fork. It does not sound 
luxurious, and £30 a year did not hold out much 
hope of bettering himself. 

Among the stock the negroes come before the 
cattle, and are described in much the same language. 

" A General List of Negroes on, and belonging to, 
Worthy Park Plantation, taken the 1st January 1787." 

The page is divided into three columns, headed 
respectively, "Names, Qualifications, and Conditions"; 
and underneath, "Quashie, Head Carpenter, Able," 
at the top of a long list that is never less than 340 
and sometimes rises to 360 names. There were 6 
Carpenters, numbering among them Mulatto Aleck, 
and 2 learning ; there were 2 Sawyers, 1 Joiner and 
Cabinet Maker, 1 Blacksmith, Mulatto John, 1 
Mason, Mulatto Billy, and 1 learning, 3 Drivers, 
1 man in the Garden who was marked Old and 
Infirm, 5 Wain men, 3 Boilers, a Head mule man, 
and 138 others, ending with children too young to 
be of any use. 

The names are various, and do not differ very 
much from those of the cattle numbered a few pages 
further on. Prussia, the Head mule man, is Able, 
Minuith is Distemper'd, and eight Macs, beginning 
with MacDonald, and ending with MacLean, are all 
Able. Nero is a field-labourer and Able, and Don't 



136 THE PLANTATION 

Care, a wain man, is Able. Further on there is a 
steer named Why Not? Waller, the Head boiler, 
is sickly, and Johnston, a field -labourer, is subject 
to "Fitts." Dryden is Able, but Elderly. Punch 
and Bacchus are Elderly and Weakly, which seems 
wrong somehow, and Ishmael is Infirm and a 
Runaway. Italy is Able, Spain is Distemper'd, and 
Portugal is Weakly. Germany is Old and Weak. 
Quaco's Jumbo is subject to Sores, and Creole Cuba's 
Cuffie is Weakly and a notorious Runaway. Poor 
Pope is lame in one hand, and so is Homer, while 
Kent, Duke, G-uy, Prince, John, Morrice, and James, 
are "all of no use, being too young." 

Then we come to the women. There are 141 
of them, 64 Field Labourers, 44 of whom are Able. 
Grace is a Driver and Elderly, and Delia and 
Dilligence are both Elderly. Baddo and Creole 
Betty are Old and Weakly, Lilly is Elderly and 
Sickly. Little Dido is "Weakly & Runaway." 
Woman is Field Cook for the Small Gang, Silvia 
is Nurse to the young Children in the Field. 
Luida's Nancy is " Superunuated." Little Yabba 
is lame in her hip, Chloe is Weakly and Worthless. 
Little Benebah is Runaway and Worthless, Strumpet 
is Able, a Runaway — could one expect much from 
a woman called by such a name ? — and that Whore 
was also Runaway and Worthless seems but a con- 
firmation of the old saying about giving a dog a bad 
name and hanging him. But Lady, too, is Runaway ; 
perhaps she was sickly and not equal to the work 
they expected of her. We may judge that the 
writer who recorded those dead-and-gone black 
labourers was not a lettered man, for he writes 
down Psyche, " Sychke." But Psyche has always 
been a difficulty. Miss Maxwell Hall on Kempshot 
Pen has a cow so named, and periodically she goes 



EXPENDING THE NEGROES 137 

through her cattle with her headman. She keeps 
her list and he presents his. Psyche he had written 
" Sikey," and the young lady coming upon it among 
the " S's " murmured to herself : — 

" Psyche, yes, 'p,' of course." He was an 
observant man, and the next time the list was 
presented to her Psyche had been written " Spikey " ! 

Perhaps the overseer did not do so badly with 
"Sychke." 

Little Abba, a field cook, has lost one hand. 
Apparently they did not trouble much about the 
field-labourer's food, hardly more than they did 
about the book-keeper's. Simbry is Elderly and 
a Gandy, which appears to have been a midwife. 
Poor Pallas is weakly. Sicily, old and weakly, 
cuts grass for the stables ; Abbas Moll, Invalid, 
" Sores," washes the bags. I hope they weren't used 
for anything important. Olive is blind, and no less 
than thirteen are "superunuated," while twenty-eight, 
among them Behaviour, Friendship, and Phebas, are 
"of no use, being very young." Later on, "Little 
Friendship's" death of fever and a sore throat is 
recorded. Here, too, are Quadroon Kitty, Quadroon 
Molly, and Quadroon Bessy, nearer the white man 
than the black but still slaves. 

George Doubt expended his negroes freely. . . . 
Thirty negroes, fifteen men and fifteen women, were 
bought on the 2nd March 1787. They were "late 
the property of Mr Alex. Stanhope dec'd, bo't of 
Edward Brailsford, Esq." Why the difference in 
the titles I don't know. They were all marked 
"Able" when they were bought, but in 1789 the 
men axe reduced to thirteen, and Toby, who was 
a Mason, is now old and infirm ; England, a sawyer, 
is old and infirm ; Roger, a field negro, is now 
"little worth"; Dick is sickly and Caesar is Able, 



138 THE PLANTATION 

but evidently he did not like Worthy Park, for 
he is always running away. Prince, now in the 
overseer's stables, is of little worth ; Cuffie is dead 
and York is now represented by a little child. 

And of the women, Flora is sickly and Delia 
is dead, and there is a sinister entry against Fidelia — 
"Died, reduced by lying in the bushes." Why did 
Fidelia leave her home and lie in the bushes till 
she was so reduced she died? 

But it is just the same tale with the older hands. 
I would condemn slavery on the Worthy Park slave 
book alone ; and Worthy Park had not the bad 
reputation Rose Hall had, yet Quashie, who opens 
the book as able in two years, is old and infirm ; 
Mulatto Aleck is infirm. Mulatto George, then 
able, is now subject to sores and "Bone ach." 
Minuith has now become Minute, and from being 
a carpenter has become a watchman, which means 
he is good for nothing else. Joan's Cudjoe, the 
Head sawyer, has against him "Rheumatism," and 
Darby, the Head Driver, formerly Able, is now 
"Ruptur'd." Guy's Quashie and Creole Scotland 
are now both elderly. Pool and Waller the Boilers 
are sent to the field sometimes, a bitter come-down 
for them, and are both elderly and infirm. Nero 
has elephantiasis, Dryden is now cutting grass, 
M'Pherson is weakly, M'Clean is asthmatic, Don't 
Care is infirm, Juba's Quashie is dead. Perhaps 
the new overseer was a harder man, for I noticed 
that Quaco's Jumbo, who was originally described 
as "Weakly and a Runaway," is now "Able but 
a Skulker." 

Philip, who was "Able," is now "infirm," and 
Pope, who only has one hand, is now "Able and 
Ill-dispos'd," and no mention is made of an infirmity 
which certainly must severely handicap a slave. 



BORN TO SLAVERY 139 

And so it goes on. Villian is "Subject to Fits," 
and Solomon is " subject to Bone ach," a long list 
which makes us feel for the weary men and women 
who must turn out into the field at the blowing 
of the conch shell. 

If you have any imagination at all there are 
many little pathetic histories in a slave book. 

There was Dolly on Worthy Park Estate, entered 
in 1787 as in the overseer's house. She had a 
baby, Mulatto Patty, in all probability the daughter 
of the overseer. If she was he goes away and 
leaves her a slave on the plantation, for she is 
entered every year to the end of the record as 
"healthy, but too young to work." Work is all that 
is expected of the white man's daughter. Poor 
little Patty ! Her mother's two next children are 
presumably black, as their colour is not mentioned, 
which it would have been had they had any white 
blood in their veins ; and presently poor Dolly is 
a field-labourer again, fallen from her high estate. 
For in Jamaica the house-servant ranks high in 
the social scale. That is why, I think, that the 
house-servants in Jamaica generally wear a hand- 
kerchief over their heads. The white bondservants 
did so because it was the custom of the time, and 
the black woman promoted from the field put a 
kerchief over her head and wore it as a sign of 
her higher social standing. The custom is dying 
hard, and it is a pity it should die at all, for the 
negro woman's hair is not her strong point and 
it is better covered. 

Then Fogo, also in the overseer's house, had a 
boy named Charles Dale, and Charles Dale is the 
blacksmith upon the estate, but there is no record 
of little Charles being freed. In truth the father 
never counted. In a record of forty births on Worthy 



140 THE PLANTATION 

Park never once is he mentioned. The births are 
put down on one side of the page as "Increase 
of the Negroes," and the baby is only mentioned 
because he is an asset, as he takes turn with the 
notice that so many negroes have been bought. 
On the other side of the page is invariably "Increase 
of Stock," kept on exactly the same lines. 

In the Eose Hall slave books, thirty years later 
in date, the births are put casually among the daily 
occurrences, just as the runaways are mentioned, 
or the fact that a certain runaway " Csesar " or 
"Arabella" is "brought home." And, perhaps, in 
the whole pitiful list in all the books, the only entry 
that looks well is that Betty Madge on Worthy Park 
has many young children and does not work. 

The last man who makes entries in this book is 
rather fond of a gentle reproach. I don't like him, 
and I don't think the negroes could have liked him 
either, though I only judge by the handwriting and 
his brief remarks. 

" Pheba Girl," for instance, is " Able but a sad 
skulker," and Lady is a "sad runaway." Psyche has 
become " Sickie " and is sickly, and Belinda, who 
two years ago was a child, is now in the field. Poor 
little girl ! Her life of labour has begun. It gave 
me great satisfaction to find that Congo Betty, who 
in the beginning was entered as "Able but a 
Runaway," in 1789 ran away for good, apparently, 
for when the book closed she had not returned, 
having been absent for over two years. I hope she 
had not died, but was happy and comfortable in the 
hills. Perhaps she joined the Maroons, but I fear 
me not even her own people were likely to be kind 
to an elderly woman. 

Others ran away, but they came back, poor things. 
Coasar and Lady and Villian and Mary and October 



SUPERANNUATED YOUNG 141 

ran away all at one time. No mention is ever 
made of their return, but they did come back, 
for later they are served with clothing, and are 
mentioned in the lists of negroes on the estate. Man 
is a gregarious animal, and, I suppose, these poor 
things, skulking in the woods and mountains, missed 
their fellows, and so they dared the stocks and the 
lock-up and the stripes, which were sure to be their 
portion when they did come back. Lady came back 
once, for in June 1788 she had a baby girl. In 
January 1791 she is among the invalids and super- 
annuated. But life among the sick evidently did not 
suit her— it probably was no bed of roses^ — for in 
the following September she left her three-years-old 
Diana and ran away, and when the book closed three 
months later she was still away. 

Though, apparently, they superannuated the slaves 
very young, we may be very sure they did not super- 
annuate them before they were actually obliged, so 
that we find they were old and useless when they 
should have been in their prime. A slave had no 
proper stimulus to labour. As a rule, he was assured 
of enough to eat when he was too old to labour, and 
practically he had little more at any stage of his 
career. 

The deaths, of course, came in under "Decrease 
of Negroes," and they died so Often of " Old Age," 
poor things, that I wonder what constituted "Old 
Age" in those days. But sometimes they died 
of "yaws," and "a consumption," and "Pluresy." 
Sometimes the children died of "Worm fever," of 
"Locked Jaw," "of Fever and Sore Throat," "of 
Cold and Sore Throat," and Little Prince was 
drowned. One of the men named Dick has my 
sincerest sympathy. He is bought from Brailsford 
as "Able," a couple of years later he is "sickly," 



142 THE PLANTATION 

then he has " Bone ach," and finally on the 1st April 
1791 he is entered as "Died of a sudden death," 
which is crossed out, and "an Asthma" put 
instead. He evidently struggled in agonising fashion 
at intervals, till at length his heart gave out and 
he was at peace. 

And one of the sad untold stories of the book lies 
behind the entry on the 24th January 1791: "By 
Hang'd himself in the woods, one of the new negro 
men bought of Rainford." He had been bought on 
the 5th of the same month, and he waited hopelessly, 
or perhaps hoping, nineteen days, and then he ended 
it, because for a slave there was no future to which 
it was worth looking forward. He is entered in the 
book as remorselessly and as carefully as the steer 
Hymen who "broke his neck in the Penn." 

Very occasionally does the decrease of the slaves 
come from the slaves being freed. But once or 
twice it does. In the year 1787 Mulatto Nelly and 
Quadroon Kitty and Quadroon Bessy were "manu- 
mized," and Mulatto Nelly is sent away. Perhaps 
the father desired to cut off from his little daughters 
all slave influence, even that of their mother ; for I 
presume Nelly was their mother. And I wonder 
were the little girls the daughters of Mr Doubt, for 
really it does not look as if the other men could 
afford to free their children. 

They do not give us an inventory of the furniture 
of the Great House, but in the overseer's house most 
things are set down when the book opens. In the 
hall, in addition to tables and chairs and a "Beaufett," 
they had six silver tablespoons and five silver tea- 
spoons, five cups and saucers, fifteen wine-glasses, 
four tumblers, and one wine decanter. In the 
overseer's room he had a mahogany bed and a small 
mahogany bed, and, of course, a feather bed' — every 



FEATHER BEDS 143 

room except the hall had one of these luxuries. In 
August in Jamaica! With the shutters close for 
fear of the slaves ! ! In the Great House at the Hyde 
the bedrooms were strangely small and confined 
when compared with the hall out of which they 
opened, and I said so once to the doctor. He 
laughed. He knew his old-time Jamaica. 

"The men who built in those times," said he, 
" didn't worry about bedrooms. The dining-hall was 
the thing ! They sat there and drank rum punch 

till well, till it didn't matter whether they slept 

under the table or were bundled out into the garden ! " 
But even if they were, shall we say "merry," at 
Worthy Park, I think the feather beds must have 
been aggravating things. 

The overseer kept in his room, too, the brands 
with which they marked the slaves— at least such, I 
suppose, were one silver mark L.P. and one silver 
stamp L.P. He had a "Sett of Gold Weights and 
Scales "—I presume for weighing gold, and not made 
of the precious metal, though where they got the 
gold to weigh I do not know ; and there was a keg 
of gunpowder and thirty-three gun flints, kept there, 
I suppose, to be under his eye. 

The doctor was not of much consequence, if we 
may judge of the furnishing of the "Doctor's 
Chamber." It had only a "common bed" and little 
else except the linen chest, in which there were 
fifteen pairs of fine sheets which strikes me as lavish 
in contrast to the paucity of everything else. There 
were eleven fine pillow-cases, one pair of Osnaburg 
sheets, two pillow-cases of the same stuff, two fine 
tablecloths, to be used on gala days I expect, and 
seven Osnaburg tablecloths. But there were only 
three Osnaburg towels, so that I am not surprised 
at the next entry, " 1 Jack towel & the other cut for 



144 THE PLANTATION 

hand towels." Seven glass cloths might be managed 
with, I suppose, but why enter " 1 do. useless and 
2 useless sideboard cloths " ? 

It is evident that in July 1791 something happened 
to the ruling power on Worthy Park, for another 
inventory is taken of the household goods and slaves, 
and one, Arthur McKenzie, who is not otherwise 
mentioned, remarks in a thin straggling hand : 
" N.B. — By the sundries found in and about the 
works, the written account is very eroneous," (so 
he is pleased to spell the word), "in particular 
speaking Table linen, Glass, Mugs, Cups, Musquito 
Netts, &c, &c. — Arthur McKenzie." 

Then underneath, "Was obliged to purchase 
Sheeting" (oh, how careless they must have been 
with those sheets), " Tablecloaths & Butter, Candles, 
and send f of the Soap sent to the Great House for 
the Works ; buy also knives, forks, spoons & send 
6 silver spoons from the 18 at the Great House.. — 
1st August '91." 

I don't wonder at his having to purchase knives, 
for the " Boy's Pantry " was certainly scantily furnished 
except in the matter of " Wash hand basons " of which 
there were ten, but four were sent to the Great House. 
There were " 9 Earthen Dishes and 6 shallow plates, 
1 Tureen, 8 Pewter dishes and only 3 new knives 
and 3 new forks, 3 old knives and four useless," so it 
rather looks as if once the overseer and a couple of 
book-keepers had been provided with a knife and 
fork apiece, the rest of the company, and there must 
have been some occasionally, had to eat their food 
with their fingers. 

In the "Dry Store" they had all sorts of things. 
Notice Posts, though considering not half a dozen 
people on the estate could read, I wonder what they 
wanted notice posts for. They had " Shovels and 



BAD STORES 145 

Broad Axes, Bullet Moulds, Old Bayonets, Negro 
Hatts and Iron Crows." The Herring Store did not 
contain herrings, at least when the inventory was 
taken, but had four large empty oil jars, half a barrel 
of turpentine, alum, roach alum, whatever that may 
be, and lamp-black. These do not seem to be exactly 
in their right place in the herring store, but Thomas 
Kitson examined the inventory and found it correct. 

They did use a great many barrels of herrings, 
for the Betsey, Captain Laurie from London, and the 
Diana, Captain Thomas Seaward from Cork, brought 
out their stores, Osnaburg and baize and " Negro 
hatts" and check from London, and salt beef and 
pork and herrings, to say nothing of tallow and 
candles and soap from Cork. That they should need 
to bring fish to an island where the sea teems with 
it, and beef and pork to a place where the cattle and 
swine would run wild and multiply in the woods 
if they were left to themselves, is a curious com- 
mentary on the wasteful fashion in which the country 
was managed. 

Again and again it is entered that the herrings 
served out were bad or "mash'd," but I am afraid 
the slaves got them all the same. Possibly they did 
not consider that bad herrings constituted cruelty 
to a slave. The pork and beef were for the white 
men, and a great deal of the unappetising stuff they 
seem to have eaten. In one year the Diana brought 
out 15 barrels of beef and 70 barrels of herrings, 
4 firkins of butter and 6 kegs of tallow ; yet they 
bought 2J barrels of beef from Kingston, 2 kegs of 
tallow and 5 firkins of butter. That they should 
have bought in the same year a cask and two-thirds 
of a tierce of codfish, and 4 barrels of American 
herrings is not so surprising considering the disparity 
between the negroes and the white men who at most 



146 THE PLANTATION 

numbered seven. In three months they served out 
to the slaves 20 barrels of herrings. 

There is an echo of the famine that struck the 
island in 1786 when 15,000 slaves died of starvation, 
for in 1790 they bought for the use of the slaves 
11,800 lbs. of cocos, that is a root not unlike a yam, 
1400 lbs. of yams, and 500 plantains, which last, 
I suppose, were stems of plantains, as 500 plantains 
would not have gone far. Worthy Park had a 
"mountain" like many other estates, for often the cattle 
are entered as having died of " Poverty and Meagre- 
ness on the mountain," or as falling into the sink hole 
on the "mountain," and presumably the slaves had 
grounds there where they grew provisions, but as 
in famines of a later date, the yams failed, and there 
were no heads to plant for the new crop which may 
possibly account for the large number of cocos bought. 

Once a year the negroes were served out " cloath- 
ing." An ordinary man or woman got 6 yards of 
Osnaburg, 3 yards of baize, and 1 "hatt," but the 
principal men and women got a little more. Lucretia 
serving at the Great House once got 12 yards of 
Osnaburg, and most of the tradesmen, the carpenters 
and the sawyers and blacksmiths, got 10 yards and 
sometimes 6 yards of check as well. 

"The negro women," says Lesley, writing as late 
as the middle of the eighteenth century, "go many 
of them quite naked. They do not know what 
shame is, and are surprised at an European's bashful- 
ness, who perhaps turns his head aside at the 
sight. . . . Their Masters give them a kind of 
petticoat, but they do not care to wear it. In the 
towns they are obliged to do it, and some of them 
there go neat enough ; but these are the favourites 
of young Squires who keep them for a certain use." 

They must have been a forlorn and ragged crew 



THE BIRTH-RATE 147 

of savages the book-keepers saw out into the fields 
every morning at daybreak. They evidently made 
them work in the hot and glaring sunshine, holeing 
for canes, cutting canes, and carting manure on their 
heads, this last a job much hated, and the whites never 
remembered, if they ever knew, that no black man 
or woman works of his own free will in the glare 
of the tropical sun. On the Gold Coast I have heard 
the people going out into the fields long before 
daylight, but I have never seen men or women 
working hard during the midday hours. This is 
only common sense, and possibly much of the sick- 
ness that decimated the slaves was due to this cause. 
There is a record of one humanitarian who discovered 
that it would be well to provide nurses for the infants. 
Every woman had to go back to field work a fort- 
night after her baby was born. She must needs take 
the child, and so great was the heat that sometimes 
the mother when she had time to attend to it found 
that the little one on her back was dead ! 

And yet these slave-owners desired children very 
much and they deplored the deaths as so much money 
gone from their pockets, just as man now-a-days 
regrets when his calf or his foal dies. They grumble 
very much because the slaves do not increase as they 
think they ought. They gave no thought to morals, 
and anybody might father a woman's child. But 
considering all things I think they grumbled un- 
reasonably. No wild animals increase rapidly in 
captivity, but in five years there were forty children 
born on Worthy Park, that is nearly 23 per thousand — 
not so very bad considering that the rate for London 
in the year 1919 among a free people was 24*8. But 
this was discounted by the number of deaths in 
infancy. Matthew Lewis tells of the ravages of 
tetanus among the newly born on his estate in the 



148 THE PLANTATION 

beginning of the last century, and neither he nor any 
one else had an idea of the cause or how it might be 
prevented. 

The midwife, the " Garundee," told him that till 
after the ninth day they had no hope of the new- 
born babies. It was, had she but known it, a sad 
commentary on her own want of cleanliness. 

The children of the white men had perhaps a 
better chance of being reared than those of the 
slaves, because the women who lived with them had 
an easier time. Their children were slaves like the 
others, but it was the custom not to put them to 
field work ; the boys they made artisans and the girls 
were trained as house-servants, and Lewis says the 
other slaves paid them a certain deference, always 
honouring the girls with the title of "Miss." 

"My mulatto housemaid," says he, "is always 
called 'Miss Polly' by her fellow-servant Phillis." 

The last entry in the Worthy Park slave book 
with George Doubt as Superintendent' — I feel as if 
I knew George Doubt — was on the 28th June 1791. 
Then apparently something happened, and Arthur 
M'Kenzie made his moan about the careless way 
in which the inventory was taken. When the returns 
for the last quarter 1791 are sent in to the Vestry 
there is quite a new departure. The "White 
People" are headed by Rose Price, Esq., and the 
Rev. John Venicomb bracketed together as having 
arrived on the 1st December, and we immediately 
imagine the son of the proprietor accompanied by 
his bear leader. But there is a still greater departure 
from the usual run of things on the 23rd of the same 
month when Edward Phelps and Sussannah Phelps 
are set down. So that the very last entry of white 
people in the book mentions a woman ! 

Was it all worth while ? Even after I have read 



WAS IT WORTH WHILE? 149 

the whole very carefully. I am not in a position to 
judge. Only it seems to me the expenses were very 
great. Not only was there the upkeep of these 
people, but they were always buying new negroes 
and in addition to that quite a considerable sum was 
paid out to negroes hired — slave gangs — to do the 
jobs for which those on the estate had neither 
strength nor time. 

Occasionally we get the returns. In January 
1790 James Fraser, one of the six overseers, certifies 
that the crop returns are 248 hogsheads, that is 124 
tons of sugar, and 85 puncheons of rum. Set that 
against the 510 tons of sugar and 301 puncheons of 
rum which Mr Fred Clarke gives me as the returns 
from the same estate in the year of our Lord 1920. 
Of course to compare exactly, I should have the 
wages returns of the present day, the cost of im- 
proved machinery and various other things, but 
looking at it from the point of view of an outsider 
it certainly looks as if it were not worth it. 

Very, very slowly we move towards perfection, 
but we do move. Perhaps one hundred and thirty 
years hence, some writer will read of 1921 with as 
much wonder as I read in this old slave book of a 
day that is done. 



CHAPTER VII 

SLAVE REBELLIONS 

Considering that every Great House was surrounded 
by hundreds of these alien dark people, most of 
them dumbly resentful of their condition, it is to 
me a little surprising that the white man ever brought 
out his wife and children to share his home. And 
yet he did sometimes. Of course, nothing is more 
certain than that we grow accustomed to a danger 
that is always threatening. There are people who 
take matches into powder factories and those who 
dwell on the slopes of Vesuvius and Etna. From 
the earliest days the Jamaicans had been used to 
forced labour, they were very sure they could not 
work the plantations without it, and that the slaves 
had to be broken in and guarded, came all in the 
day's work. 

The first difficulty after the buying of the slaves 
was what they called the "seasoning." The earlier 
settlers first used the word, but it came to be applied 
specially to the settling down of the slaves, though 
it seems to me simply to mean the survival of the 
fittest. A certain number of newly arrived slaves were 
sure to die. It was not the climate that killed them, 
but the breaking in of a free savage unaccustomed 
to work, at least not to work with the regularity, 
and at the times the white man expected of him. 
He was an exile, he was lonely, he was driven to 

150 




age 150. 



CRUELTY AND STARVATION 151 

this hated work with the whip, he could not under- 
stand what was said to him, he could not make 
his wants known, and soon realised it would avail 
him little if he did, and he pined and died. 

In Lesley's time, and I am afraid long after, the 
slaves were grossly underfed. 

"'Tis sad," he writes, "to see the mean shifts to 
which these poor creatures are reduced. You'll see 
them daily about twelve o'clock when they turn in 
from work scraping the dunghills at every gentleman's 
door" (I do like that touch) "for bones which 
they break extremely small, boil and eat the broth." 
He adds that he hardly cares to speak of their 
sufferings because of the regard he had for their 
masters. And then he goes on to do so. He says 
that the most trivial error was punished with a 
terrible whipping, " I have seen some of them treated 
in that cruel manner for no other reason but to 
satisfy the brutish pleasure of an overseer. ... I 
have seen their bodies in a Gore of Blood, the Skin 
torn off their backs with the cruel Whip, beaten, 
Pepper and Salt rubbed on the Wounds and a large 
stick of Sealing Wax dropped leisurely upon them. 
It is no wonder if the horrid pain of such inhuman 
tortures incline them to rebel; at the same time it 
must be confessed they are very perverse, which is 
owing to the many disadvantages they lie under, 
and the bad example they daily see." 

A man had a right to kill his slave or mutilate 
him if he ran away, but a man who killed a slave 
out of "Wilfulness, Wantonness, or Bloody minded- 
ness," was to suffer three months' imprisonment 
and pay £50 to the owner of the slave. It was 
merely a question of value, the slave was not 
considered. If a servant killed a slave he was to 
get thirty-nine lashes on the bare back, and serve 



152 SLAVE REBELLIONS 

the owner of the slave after his time with his master 
had expired four years. That is to say, he had to 
pay for the loss of the slave's services. Indeed the 
negro's life in those days was by no means safe- 
guarded, for if a man killed by night a slave found 
out " of his owner's grounds, road, or common path, 
such person was not to be subject to any damage 
or action for the same." That is to say, the wander- 
ing slave was a danger to the community, and might 
be killed on suspicion as might some beast of prey. 
There was a law, too, that all slaves' houses should 
be searched once a fortnight for " Clubs, Wooden 
Swords, and mischievious Weapons." Any found 
were to be burnt. Stolen goods were also to be 
sought, and " Flesh not honestly come by " ; for slaves 
were forbidden to have meat in their possession. 
The punishment was death, and in the slave book 
of Rose Hall after this law had fallen into desuetude 
there is an entry under Monday, 28th September 
1824: "Killed a steer named 'Porter' in conse- 
quence of his leg being broken, sunk him in the 
sea to prevent the negroes from eating it, and having 
the like accidents occur." It does seem hard so 
to waste the good meat that the negroes craved, 
poor things, as children nowadays crave sugar. For 
a negro does not regard meat as food even now. 
It is a treat, a luxury. 

In Kingston and other towns the notice ran, 
" No person whatever shall fire any small arms after 
eight at night unless upon alarm of insurrection 
which is to be by the Discharge of Four Muskets 
or small arms distinctly." The whole atmosphere 
was one of fear. No negro or mulatto was permitted 
to row in any wherry or canoe without at least one 
white man, and all boats of every description had 
to be chained up and their oars and sails safely 



WORKING BOTH WAYS 153 

disposed, and so important was this rule considered 
that any master of a craft who broke it was fined 
£10. There was a punishment of four years' imprison- 
ment for stealing or taking away any craft, and it is 
clear this had reference not to its value but to the 
assistance such craft might be to the common enemy. 

A negro slave striking any person except in 
defence of his master's property — observe he had 
none of his own — was for the first offence to be 
severely whipt, for the second to be severely 
whipt, have his or her nose slit and face burnt 
in some place, and for the third it was left to two 
Justices or three freeholders to inflict "Death or 
whatever punishment they shall think fit." 

When slaves were first introduced the master 
seems to have had absolute power of life and death, 
and indeed long after, when it was beginning to 
dawn on the ruling race that the black man had 
some rights, it was still difficult to punish a cruel 
master, because no black man's evidence could be 
received against a white man. This rule, too, 
sometimes worked both ways. 

There was once an overseer who was cruelly 
unjust to the book-keeper under him. As we have 
seen, the underlings subsisted very largely on salt 
food. This overseer, disliking his book-keeper, 
decreed that his salt fish should be exposed to the 
hot sun until it was rotten and then cooked and 
offered to him in the usual way. The young man 
protested, and the overseer declared he had fish 
out of the same barrel and found nothing wrong 
with it. Finally the exasperated book-keeper came 
up to the house and in desperation shot his tormentor. 
But he was never brought to justice, because there 
were only slaves present and no white man could 
be convicted on the testimony of a slave. 



154 SLAVE REBELLIONS 

When we read the slave code we do well to 
remember not how men are punished nowadays, 
but how they were all punished, black and white, 
in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and the first part 
of the nineteenth centuries. Laws were made for 
the rich, and the poor man without influence must 
go under. 

And having said all this, it perhaps seems curious 
to add that we ought always to remember that the 
average planter treated his slaves as well as he 
knew how. Even now we are always advancing. 
The housemistress of 1921 has to give her maids 
of right what the housemistress of 1900 would have 
thought ridiculous, even as a privilege. It was to 
the planter's interest that his slaves should be in 
good health and contented, but what none of them 
understood was that no man should be subject to 
the whim of another. The wrong was in enslaving 
a man. How should they understand it? Slavery 
had been a custom from time immemorial. Even 
in this twentieth century I have heard one of the 
best and kindest women I know mourning, "But 
if the poor are all so well off what shall we do 
for servants?" She found it difficult to believe 
that Providence would not arrange for someone to 
serve her. So the planters, I am sure, believed 
that Providence had placed the black man in Africa 
specially for their use. Why he was not contented 
with his lot, and a "good" slave, they could never 
understand. And yet the black people didn't even 
mind dying, to such sore straits were the poor things 
reduced. 

"They look upon death," declares Lesley, "as 
a blessing. . . . Tis indeed surprising to see with 
what courage and intrepidity some of them will 
meet their fate and be merry in their last moments." 



AN EVER PRESENT DANGER 155 

He had seen more deaths than we of the 
twentieth century can contemplate with equanimity, 
and many runaways trying to better their lot. It 
was probably easier for the first slaves to run 
away than at the time we come across them in the 
slave books of Worthy Park and Rose Hall. The 
lonelier parts of the island were abandoned because 
of these runaway negroes, who banded themselves 
together and were a constant danger to the isolated 
settler. And a place in fertile Jamaica abandoned 
soon becomes densest jungle, affording a still more 
useful shelter to people accustomed to such surround- 
ings. Even though the life of a savage in the woods 
was a hard one, it was better than the almost certain 
fate that awaited them if they came in and gave 
themselves up. I conclude it was only when a slave 
found himself alone that he returned of his own 
free will. If he found companions he stayed. 

This of course it was that made of the Maroons 
such an ever present danger, free as they were among 
a black population that outnumbered the white ten 
to one. The settler had always an enemy within 
the gates. 

"This bad success," mourns the historian when 
the whites have failed to overcome the Maroons, 
"encouraged Gentlemen's slaves to rebel." 

The trouble was that to keep the slaves under, 
a great quantity of arms and ammunition had to 
be stored on the plantations, and when they rose 
this was likely to be turned against their owners. 
Did one of those overseers at Worthy Park ever 
toss restlessly on his feather bed and wonder what 
would be his fate if some of those slaves, the "ill- 
disposed" or "skulkers," rushed his hot room and 
possessed themselves of that store of powder ? 

It is only natural that history should mention 



156 SLAVE REBELLIONS 

the rebellions that made their mark, and never those 
that were nipped in the bud. But those that had 
a measure of success were numerous enough. There 
were no less than four between 1678 and 1691, 
in the three last of which many white people were 
murdered. One of these was at Sutton's, a plantation 
near the centre of the island. 

I have been to Sutton's. A long low house it is, 
not the first house, the slaves burned that, behind 
it are the green hills and in front red lilies grow 
beneath the bananas after the rain. The women 
who were born there say it is the loveliest plantation 
in an island of lovely plantations. And here at 
the end of the seventeenth century, 400 slaves, stark 
naked savages with hoes and machetes in their hands, 
stormed the house, and by sheer weight of numbers 
bore all before them. They murdered their master 
and every white man there, and seized all the arms 
kept to be used against them. Fifty muskets and 
blunderbusses and other arms they took, great 
quantities of shot and four small field pieces — 
(in such fear they had been held) — and then they 
marched on, raiding other plantations and killing 
every white person they could lay their hands upon. 

Why they did not keep their freedom I do not 
know, but once the whites were roused they had no 
chance. They fled back to Sutton's, and driven out 
of that they fired the cane pieces. Then a party of 
whites came up behind and completely routed them. 
Many were killed, some escaped to the hills, but 200 
laid down their arms and surrendered. Very un- 
wisely. For though some were pardoned our 
chronicler declares that most of those who submitted 
"met with that fate which they well deserved." 

In the eighteenth century there were at least 
nineteen terrible disturbances, sometimes called 



THE GREAT REBELLION 157 

rebellions, sometimes conspiracies, to murder the 
whites, and in the thirty-two years of the nineteenth 
century that elapsed before the apprenticeship system 
that heralded the freeing of the slave was introduced, 
there were no less than six rebellions, conspiracies 
and mutinies, to say nothing of the isolated murders 
that must have been done and were not worth 
recording as history. 

Not only were these rebellions sanguinary but 
they were expensive. The cost of putting down the 
last in 1832 was £161,596, without taking into account 
the damage sustained by property and the loss to the 
community of the lives sacrificed. If the black man 
suffered, white Jamaica too paid very heavily indeed 
for her slaves. 

The Great Rebellion that was long remembered 
in Jamaica was the rebellion of 1760, and it broke 
out in St Mary's Parish on the Frontier Plantation 
belonging to a man named Ballard Beckford. The 
adjoining estate was Trinity, belonging to Zachary 
Bayley, the maternal uncle of Bryan Edwards the 
historian, but in his book we only get a tantalising 
account that sets us longing for more details. 

Of the leaders, "their barbarous names," says 
Bridges, forgetting that the white man had probably 
supplied those names, "were Tacky and Jamaica," 
and Tacky was a man who had been a chief in 
"Guiney." That, though Edwards did not know 
it, meant that he had been accustomed to a certain 
amount of savage grandeur ; had been dressed in 
silk of bright colours, and wore a necklace of gold 
and anklets and armlets of the same metal. On his 
fingers and bare black toes had been rings of rough 
nuggets. He had been wont to ride in a hammock, 
as King George rides in his State coach, and with 
an umbrella carried by slaves high over his head ; to 



158 SLAVE REBELLIONS 

the great discomfort of the slaves, but it had marked 
his high estate. He would move to the accompani- 
ment of barbaric music and on great feast days, such 
as that of his accession, his " stool," the symbol of 
his power, really a carved wooden seat, was literally 
drenched in the blood of many unfortunate men and 
women. I remember passing through an Ashanti 
town on the day of the Coronation of our present 
King. There was a great feast and all the minor 
chiefs for miles round had come in to celebrate 
and all the stools were soaked in blood — sheep's 
blood. 

"Not long ago," said the great chief, "it would 
have been men's." 

" Oh ! " said the young doctor who was with me, 
"sheep's is better." 

"Perhaps," said the African potentate doubtfully, 
and it was clear he was thinking regretfully of the 
days when there really would have been something 
like a decent sacrifice. 

In Tacky's days, too, when the chief died, a great 
pit would be dug, his bier lowered into it and round 
it would be seated a large number of his harem who 
would accompany their lord and master as attendants 
to the shades, and lucky indeed might they count 
themselves if they had their throats cut first and 
were not buried alive. 

Even so late as 1908 in Tarkwa I remember a 
chief — not a great one — dying, and at the same 
time there came to the District Commissioner a 
woman complaining that her adopted daughter, an 
euphemism for a household slave, had disappeared. 
And the District Commissioner said he was certain, 
though he could not prove it, that the girl had been 
stolen and sacrificed that the soul of the chief might 
not go unaccompanied on his last journey, as that 



A BID FOR FREEDOM 159 

troublesome British Government had set its face 
against the sacrifice of wives. 

Clearly Tacky could not have objected to slavery 
as an institution, he only objected to it as applied 
to himself. And he was accustomed to bloodshed. 

On those two plantations where the rebellion 
started were over 100 Gold Coast negroes, and the 
historian declares they had never received the least 
shadow of ill-treatment from the time of their arrival 
there. Like Tacky, he was not so far advanced as to 
realise that the holding of a man in slavery was in 
itself gross ill-treatment. We can hardly blame him 
if he did not think ahead of his times, though we 
more enlightened may hold a brief for Tacky and 
those Guinea men, brutal as they undoubtedly were. 

Mr Bayley, it appears, inspected his newly pur- 
chased Africans, was pleased with the stalwart crew 
and gave out to them with his own hands not only 
clothing but knives. Then he rode off to Ballard's 
Valley, an estate a few miles distant. 

The Guinea men lost no time in making a bid 
for freedom. At daybreak, in the morning, Mr 
Bayley was wakened by a servant with the informa- 
tion that his Trinity negroes had revolted ; and 
the people who brought the information shouted 
that the insurgents were close upon their heels. Mr 
Bayley seems to have been a man of action and 
equal to the occasion. A council was held at 
Ballard's Valley, the house that could be most easily 
defended in the neighbourhood was selected, and 
Mr Bayley mounted his horse and accompanied by 
a servant rode out to warn every place he could 
reach. But first, being very sure the revolted slaves — 
his slaves at any rate — had nothing to complain of, 
he rode out to meet them. I can imagine that 
gentleman of the eighteenth century in shirt and 



160 SLAVE REBELLIONS 

drawers, in the dewy tropical morning, his broad 
straw hat over a handkerchief on his head, a knife 
at his belt and pistols at his holsters, mounting his 
horse in hot haste at the verandah steps and riding 
straight down the hill with his bond-servant behind 
him shouting to those who watched his departure, 
perhaps protesting at his rashness, that he would 
bring the ungodly villains to their bearings. 

But he had barely started before he heard the 
wild ear-piercing Koromantyn yell of war, and saw 
below him on the hillside a body of stark-naked 
negroes marching in rude order for the overseer's 
house not half a mile away. He looked back. The 
other gentlemen were mounting in hot haste, making 
for the rendezvous, rousing the country as they 
went and then — a brave man was Zachary Bayley — 
he rode towards the body of negroes. They did 
not notice him at first, and with the confidence of 
the white man he went towards them waving his 
hat and shouting. Truly a brave man, for 100 
Ashantis armed with muskets and knives, yelling, 
shouting, foaming at the mouth, with fierce eyes 
and white teeth gleaming, men young and strong, 
chosen for their strength, are not to be lightly 
faced. Had they all come on he could not possibly 
have escaped, but the negroes were always keen 
on plunder, and apparently only a few turned aside 
from their main objective, the overseer's house, and 
met him with a discharge of muskets. His servant's 
horse was shot under him— shocking bad shots they 
must have been to do so little damage — and the 
chronicler declares they both narrowly escaped with 
their lives. I'd have liked him better had he told 
me how. I expect the overseer's house was more 
interesting than a man who, if put to it, would 
certainly show fight. At least he found discretion 



A DETERMINED MAN 161 

the better part of valour, and the rest of the 
Koromantyns went on to the overseer's house. At 
Trinity the overseer was a man named Abraham 
Fletcher, who had earned the respect and love of 
the negroes, and he had been allowed to pass through 
the ranks of the revolting slaves and escape scot- 
free. I don't know whether he was the man who 
brought the news to Ballard's Valley. But they 
showed no such mercy here. All the white men 
in that overseer's house they butchered before they 
were fairly awake, and then passed on towards Port 
Maria. There were some among them evidently 
who knew the ropes. The fort at Port Maria must 
have been guarded with singular carelessness, for 
they slew the sentry, and seem easily to have 
possessed themselves of all the arms and ammuni- 
tion they could manage, and then they went through 
the country slaying and burning. 

Luckily they stayed to burn. It gave Zachary 
Bayley time to ride round to all the plantations 
in the neighbourhood. 

We can imagine the excited, determined man on 
the galloping horse dashing up the hills to the 
Great Houses, his breathless arrival and the warning 
given, the name of the place of rendezvous. 

"But we can't" — the protest might begin. But 
the other knew they must get there. 

" I tell you the slaves have risen. The overseer and 
book-keepers at Cruikshank's have been murdered ! 
Get your horses. There's not a minute to be lost ! " 

" But my blackguards " 

"Damnation ! The Koromantyns I tell you, man ! 
Hurry along that girl of yours and her child ! I 
saw the place burning ! I heard the poor beggars' 
frantic shrieks and I couldn't help them, Cruikshank 
has cleared out. For the love of God, stir yourself! " 



162 SLAVE REBELLIONS 

"But the girl is " 

" I tell you they killed Nancy and a child at her 
breast, and she a mulatto, and dark at that ! Not 
a drop of white blood ! Hurry ! Waste not a 
second ! Is that the nearest road to Brimmer 
Hall?" He stretches out his whip. "Tell the 
others you saw me, and I'll be back as soon as 
I can. But — my God, man, if you want to save 
your bacon, hurry ! " and his horse turned with a 
clatter and he was away again, leaving dismay and 
consternation behind him. 

And well they might fear. From the butchery 
at Ballard's Valley, where they had drunk rum 
mixed with the blood of their victims in true 
barbaric triumph, the revolting slaves marched to 
Port Maria, and thence along the high road into 
the interior, the other slaves joining them as they 
went, and they spread death and destruction, 
murdering the people and firing the canes. The 
galloping horse on an errand of mercy did not reach 
Esher and other estates, they were roused too late 
by the Koromantyn yell, and the Ashantis behaved 
like the bloodthirsty savages they were. In that 
one morning they butchered between thirty and 
forty whites and mulattoes, sparing not even the 
babies in their mother's arms. 

Gladly would I know something more about it, 
but the historian was not an artist, and doubtless 
in those days everybody knew exactly what happened. 
In the heat of the day the whites would be lolling 
idly in the great hall, second breakfast just finished, 
and there would come the pad, pad of bare feet on 
the polished mahogany floor. 

"Missus! Missus! Run! Dem Koromantyns ! 
Dem bad slaves ! " 

Some one would look from the window. The 



FUGITIVES 163 

noise that had been as the other noises of a morn- 
ing's work swelled in the sea breeze, and there was 
a commotion, naked figures rushing here and there 
and — What was that? That white man running 
with his face all bloody. Could it be the new book- 
keeper ? 

Even at this day there are people who will tell 
you what tradition has told them that the negroes 
would come on in a body, fling themselves like an 
avalanche on the Great House and cut down ruth- 
lessly all before them. Or if they found the white 
people fled, they satisfied their desires by broaching 
the rum casks and breaking open the stores. This 
possibly saved many lives, for while the enemy were 
thus engaged the fugitives made the best of their 
way to some place of safety. They did not always 
succeed in reaching it, for the slaves knew the 
woods far better than their masters, a thousand 
times better than their mistresses, and they hunted 
them, beat the bush for them, as beaters beat for 
pheasants, cut down the men with the machetes they 
themselves had supplied or beat them with conch 
shells — and the women, nothing could be more 
terrible than the fate of the poor girl cowering on 
the hillside among the dense jungle, its very dense- 
ness betraying her presence to eyes keen as those of 
these savages trained to hunt. 

Edwards gives no details of what happened to 
the women slain in this rebellion, but a little later 
on he speaks of the rebellion in Hayti and he tells 
how a superintendent who had been popular and 
good to his slaves was treated by them when they 
rose, and he adds the ghastly details of what 
happened to his wife, who was expecting almost 
immediately the birth of her baby. They are too 
terrible to give here, though I do not count myself 



164 SLAVE REBELLIONS 

over- squeamish, but it made me understand why 
Zachary Bayley fled at full speed along those rough 
hillside tracks to warn the planters. 

There is another horrible story told of a Jamaican 
planter whose slaves rose against him, slaves whom 
he trusted and to whom he had been kind. They 
rose in the night led by a runaway he had rescued 
from starving in the woods. They gagged him and 
then proceeded to torture him, "by turns wounded 
his most tender and sensitive parts till his soul took 
flight." They violated his wife and killed her with 
the rest of the family and every white man on the 
plantation. 

This is what the white people feared sub- 
consciously all the time. What the girls feared 
when they let down their hair and undressed for 
the night, when they drew together the shutters and 
shut out the gorgeous tropical moonlight, what the 
master of the house feared when he stirred in his 
sleep, uneasily, roused because the dogs were bark- 
ing, what the mother feared as she hushed her baby's 
crying to listen, and wonder if that were the tramp 
of unshod feet over in the direction of the breeze 
mill. It is what Zachary Bayley feared when he 
tore across the country in the dawn of the tropical 
morning. 

By noon he had collected 130 men, "white men 
and trusty blacks." We do not know the proportion 
of white men to "trusty blacks/' but we do know 
that the white men were all imbued with the same 
awful fear, the fear lest all the Koromantyns in the 
island, and there were thousands of them, should 
revolt. These men Bayley led in pursuit of the 
rebels. 

The wasteful savages had dissipated the 
advantage they had gained. They might have held 



WASTED OPPORTUNITIES 165 

the whole colony up to ransom, but instead they 
were actually found at Haywood Hall roasting an 
ox by the flames of the buildings they had set on fire. 

I should like to know more precise details, but 
Edwards only says the whites attacked them with 
great fury, killed eight or nine on the spot, took 
several prisoners and drove the rest into the woods. 
Here, of course, sustenance could not be found for 
so large a party all at once, and they were obliged 
to act wholly on the defensive. The ruling class 
when they were thoroughly aroused had this in their 
favour, they had some sort of discipline, the blacks 
had none. Sullenly enough they had retired to the 
woods, and there Tacky the chief who had in- 
stituted the revolt was killed by one of the parties 
which constantly harried the wretched fugitives, 
and before long some died, some made good in the 
recesses of the mountains and the rest were taken. 

But before they were conquered the revolt had 
spread across the island to Westmoreland. 

"In St Mary," writes Bridges, "they were re- 
pulsed, broken and disheartened. In Westmoreland 
they were flushed with early victory ; murderous 
success crowned their first efforts ; they beat off the 
militia, increased their ranks to a thousand effective 
men, and after a tedious struggle they could be 
subdued only by the exertions of a regiment of 
regulars, the militia of the neighbouring parish and 
the Maroons of the interior. The most cruel ex- 
cesses that ever stained the pages of history, marked 
the progress of these rebels ; and the details which 
would elucidate barbarity scarcely human, almost 
chills the warm hope of civilisation ever reaching the 
bosoms in which ferocity is so innate." 

Edwards takes some trouble to show us what 
the civilisation of the times meant and what might 

M 



166 SLAVE REBELLIONS 

be hoped from it. It was better to die than be 
taken, for there was little to choose between black 
and white in fiendish cruelty. The white gentleman 
ran the ignorant savage close. 

"It was thought necessary," says Edwards, "to 
make a few examples of some of the most guilty. 
Of three who were clearly proved to have been 
concerned in the murders at Ballard's Valley, one 
was condemned to be burnt and the other two to 
be hung up alive in irons and left to perish in that 
dreadful situation." 

There is in the Jamaican Institute a set of the 
irons used for such a sentence. When found, they 
had the bones of a skeleton in them, the skeleton of 
a woman ! 

They burnt the man after the fashion that Hans 
Sloane described. He uttered not a groan when 
they applied the fire to his feet, and saw his legs 
and feet reduced to ashes with the " utmost firmness 
and composure. Then getting one of his hands 
loose he seized a burning brand and flung it in the 
face of his executioner." Truly a man it seems to 
me who might have been worth something better. 

In the case of the other two, Fortune and 
Kingston, the whole proceeding was gone through 
with a ghastly deliberation that makes us shiver 
now although it happened a hundred and sixty years 
ago. They were given a hearty meal and then they 
were hung up on a gibbet which was erected on the 
parade of the town of Kingston. Edwards declares 
that from the time they were hung up till the moment 
they died they never uttered a complaint. A week 
later they were still alive and as the authorities 
thought that one of them had something to tell his 
late master, Zachary Bayley, who was on his planta- 
tion, Edwards was sent for, but though he had an 



AMIDST A HOSTILE PEOPLE 167 

interpreter he could not understand what the man 
wanted and he only remembers that one of them 
laughed immoderately at something, he did not 
know what. They must have had water, for one 
lived for eight days and the other one died on the 
morning of the ninth day. 

"Throughout their torture," remarks Bridges, 
"they evinced such hardened insolence and brutal 
insensibility that even pity was silenced." What 
did he expect them to do ? They could not expect 
any mercy, so why should they express regret except 
for having failed ? 

But did Bridges really believe, "that their 
condition was gradually rising in the scale of humanity 
and the tide of Christianity, which in the wilds of 
Africa never could have reached them, was here 
flowing with a gentle but accelerated motion." God 
save us from the Christianity preached by some of 
its advocates. 

Here I may put it on record that the slaves, no 
matter to what torture they were subjected, never 
betrayed each other. In all the tale of conspiracies 
and rebellion seldom are we told of a slave having 
betrayed the secret of the proposed rising, and when 
one did there was generally strong reason for it. 
Once a girl begged that the life of her nursling might 
be saved. The man of whom she begged the baby's 
life refused — all the whites must die. So she saved 
the baby she loved and its mother and father by 
betraying the rebellion. Then again, sometimes 
I think a girl might tell to save the life of her white 
lover, the book-keeper or the overseer of the estate. 

One would think that living amidst a hostile 
people every white man would be most careful in 
his comings and goings, careful even of what he 
said, for though at first the negroes did not under- 



168 SLAVE REBELLIONS 

stand English, the house servants soon learned it, 
and we may be very sure that the doings and sayings 
of the people up at the Great House were reported 
daily in the slave village and listened to with as 
great avidity as to-day we read the news of the 
world in the daily papers. 

Besides, all the slaves were not hostile. The 
Creoles, born to the conditions in which they found 
themselves, were more contented. They regarded 
slavery as their natural lot, and it was only by slow 
degrees that the talk of emancipation grew. But it 
did grow and the rebellion of 1832, a very devastating 
one, which ran like wildfire through Westmoreland, 
Hanover, and St James', was caused mainly because 
at the Great Houses and the " Buckras' " tables the 
white people talking carelessly before the black 
servants, to whom they never gave a thought, declared 
emphatically that all this talk of emancipation was 
so much rubbish. 

And at Christmas time, the angry, disappointed, 
misguided slaves rose. I have always taken 
particular interest in this rebellion, because I once 
enjoyed the hospitality of Montpelier, one of the 
loveliest pens in Jamaica, where much money has 
been spent, and beneath the trees on the green grass 
rest white Indian cattle bred for draught purposes. 
Mr Edwards, the owner, told me that he used to 
hear stories in his youth of how the slaves burned 
the houses, and mills, and cane pieces, and the 
night was alight with blazing fires. Major Hall and 
his wife, high in the hills at Kempshot, received 
warning just in time, and through the darkness made 
their way to Worcester, lying far below. 

It must have been terrible, stumbling down that 
stony mountain path through the darkness, with the 
dread fear that the enemy might reach Worcester 



THE MANGO WALK 169 

before them. Neither husband nor wife returned, nor 
was the house rebuilt, and not till nearly fifty years 
afterwards did Mr Maxwell Hall, seeking through the 
country for a site on which to build an observatory, 
choose a hill on Kempshot Pen just above the place 
where the old house had stood. Where the country 
was not dense jungle it was occupied by negro 
cultivators, the most destructive cultivators perhaps 
in the world, of the old house there was not one 
stone left upon another, nothing remained but the 
Mango Walk. It stands there still, the only 
monument to the white people who once lived on 
that spot. The trees have long given over bearing, 
but the avenue is a thing of beauty, and to the very 
tops has grown a lovely creeper which strews the 
ground beneath with heavily scented white bell- 
shaped flowers. 

It has nothing to do with them, of course, but 
in my mind that beautiful Walk stands for the slave 
rebellions, the terrible times that are past and gone 
but hardly forgotten. In judging the relations of 
the white man and the black, in weighing the causes 
of discord between them, in considering the short- 
comings of both, we must always remember that past 
when they lived together bound by a tie galling to 
both which has left behind it a legacy of bitterness 
that only time and success on the part of the black 
man can sweeten. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE MAROONS 

Considering the size of Jamaica, it seems strange 
to say that in the fastnesses of its mountains there 
lived a body of men, just a handful of them, who 
actually defied the British Government and all the 
arms they could bring against them, not for a year or 
twenty years, but for close on one hundred and 
forty years ! 

It seems incredible ; but when I went to live 
at the Hyde I began to believe it, once I had gone 
up to Maroon town I quite understood it, and before 
I had left Jamaica, having spent three months at 
Kempshot, I saw what an ideal country was this 
for guerilla warfare such as the Maroons waged. 
The story of these black men is one that deserves 
to be remembered and set down beside the tale 
of the Doones in Devonshire, or the Highland 
Chiefs who held the glens of Scotland for the 
Stuart king. 

The origin of the term "Maroon" is somewhat 
obscure. There are people who say it is derived 
from a Spanish word meaning wild, and there are 
others who declare that Maroons simply meant hog- 
hunters, for upon these animals the free-booters lived. 

Bryan Edwards says the Spaniards left 1500 
slaves behind them. Bridges is sure that every 
Spanish slave was killed or taken within eight 
years of the conquest of the island. But this parson 

170 



"A HAPPY SLAVE— A DEGRADED MAN" 171 

of the Church of England is a gentleman whom 
the more we read him the less we like him. He 
was a time-server and a sycophant on his own 
showing. His evident intention was to please the 
planters, and though that in itself is not a crime, 
it is certainly a sin, when a man undertakes to write 
a history, to look only for the good on one side, 
and to be very sure of the evil on the other. In 
the days of Bridges (he wrote in 1828), the island 
was divided into planters and slaves, and the man 
who drank the planters' punch, who was entertained 
in their houses, who laid himself out to be so invited — 
" sucked up " as Australian school-boys used to say — 
was hardly likely to consider the slaves anything but 
the dregs of humanity. It flattered the vanity of the 
planters to think that within eight years of the 
driving out of the Spaniards their slaves were 
subdued as well. It is hardly likely they were. It 
seems to me that that little band of men, hidden 
away among the cockpit country of St James and 
Trelawny, and in the mountains of Portland and 
St Thomas, probably began with the slaves left 
behind by the Spaniards, and were recruited by 
all the more adventurous spirits who managed to 
escape from their loathed bondage. For I do not 
believe that the black people, as some people say, 
were happier as slaves. Rather do I agree with 
Burke who, in the great debates on the Abolition 
of the Slave Trade, said: "That nothing made a 
happy slave but a degraded man." 

The cockpit country of Jamaica is an amazing 
country still. I paid it a visit by the courtesy of 
Mr Moralez, the father of the lovely girl who owned 
the little canoe, and she came with me to show 
me points of interest, for she had lived in Montego 
Bay all her life. 



172 THE MAROONS 

It was a glorious morning in December, and 
December mornings in Jamaica are more likely to 
be delicious than a May morning in England or 
Australia. There is something in the soft, cool air 
that no mere pen can describe. Everywhere is 
green, dark green of pimento, light green of akee 
or dogwood, vivid green of cane. Crushing in the 
sugar mills has begun, and all is activity as you 
pass the works on the estates. On the roads, 
marching along with loads on their heads, mostly 
of green banana for it happened to be a Monday, 
were throngs of people, mostly women. They tramp 
miles — old women, young women, boys, and little 
girls who step out on sturdy little black legs and 
swing their short and scanty frocks, and are smiling 
under a load that surprises me, for they are proud 
that they, too, may join the throng of wage-earners, 
small wage- earners when we compare results with 
other labourers in the outside world, but still, slaves 
no longer, and earning money that is their very own. 

The road winds with hairpin curves up the steep 
hills. Sheer up on one side, very often built up 
with stone on the other — there is rock in plenty — 
and sheer down into the valley below. Soon we 
were on mountain land, untouched by the hand of 
man, and crawling up one side of a mountain we 
could look over to the breakneck mountain side 
across the cockpit that lay between, for the cockpits 
mentioned so often in the history of Jamaica are 
what we should call gullies in Australia, and glens 
in Scotland. Precipitous holes are they, and far 
below us and far above us we could see tree-ferns 
such as I have not seen since I left Australia, and 
all the steep mountain sides are bound together 
with undergrowth and creeper, growing so densely 
that I can quite well believe a man who said you 



A SPLENDID LAND 173 

could progress only at the rate of a quarter of 
a mile a day when you had to cut your way through. 
There are trees, of course, wonderful trees, festooned 
with vines, but we could only see them from a 
distance, the trees on the other side of the mountain ; 
close at hand we saw only the tangle of greenery 
growing round the trunks. And the trees grow 
tall and straight in their struggle towards the light 
and sunshine. There is mahogany, the lovely wood 
we all know — I pride myself on my mahogany 
wardrobes ; there is mahoe, nearly as fine ; there 
is bullet wood, hard as its name implies and too 
good for the sleepers into which it is made, and 
wherever there is space enough for it, it looks splendid 
standing out against the blue on some mountain 
spur, there is the symmetrical broad leaf which is 
akin to what they call the almond, though it is 
certainly not the almond of Italy. And again, close 
at hand, there is maiden-hair and coral, and other 
ferns like a conservatory grown wild, growing beside 
little springs of crystal clear water that spurt out 
among the rocks ; and there are creamy ginger lilies 
turning their delicate faces to the light, and other 
lilies, gorgeous as a tulip, red splashed with orange, 
true daughters of the sun. And always is the 
feathery bamboo wildly luxuriant, growing as if 
this were its original habitat, which it is not, and 
the innumerable creepers which bind all these things 
growing riotously with the richness of life that 
prevails in the tropics. Oh, a splendid land ! But 
I do not wonder that here for over a hundred years 
the Maroons were masters, and raided down into 
the pens and estates that encroached on their 
grounds with impunity. They say that the Maroons 
were not friendly with the slaves. But that was 
not always true. Maroons and slaves were the 



174 THE MAROONS 

same colour, and that is a great bond — how great 
a bond we only realise when we have left a land 
where everyone is white, and at length see in any 
one of our own colour at least a potential friend. 
So I think it must have been with the Maroons 
till the white men made of them slave-catchers, and 
even then the unalterable tie must have sometimes 
held good. 

I have lived in Trelawny and in Montego Bay, 
places close to the Maroon Country, though twenty 
miles in Jamaica up steep acclivities, down abrupt 
slopes, across mountain passes, is twenty times as 
far as it would be in another land. But the Hyde 
was close to the cockpit country. We went just 
a little way behind into the hills and we soon came 
to a place where no wheeled vehicle could pass, 
where we must of necessity walk along the bridle 
track cut in the side of the steep mountains that 
rose up on either hand, though perhaps a very sure- 
footed horse or mule might have carried us in safety. 
And all the houses round about those hills had loop- 
holes in their walls. 

"For the Maroons." 

The people have forgotten long ago the old-time 
fear ; only when you see a curious loophole in the 
lower masonry of a house, a house on the hillside 
to which you mount by many winding stone steps — 
a fine staircase in any land — and you ask what is 
that for, the dwellers say, "The Maroons." But 
sometimes it was for general defence, defence against 
the picaroons that infested the seas, against the 
slaves who might rise at any time. But round about 
Montego Bay and in the hills in Trelawny close 
against the cockpit country those slots in the 
masonry were certainly against the Maroons. 

Dallas says that many of the slaves who rose 



FEAR 175 

at Suttons in Clarendon made their way to the 
Maroons in the heart of the island, and after that 
their numbers were occasionally recruited from 
among the plantation negroes. They got provisions 
from the provision grounds, and the settlers who 
lived a little back from the towns in places like 
Balaclava (which was not Balaclava then), Ulster 
Springs, on the mountain sides as at the Hyde, 
Catadupa, and quaintly named Lapland, were kept 
in a perpetual state of alarm. 

There was a time when I thought to be kept 
in a perpetual state of alarm would make life 
impossible, and I wondered at pioneers who first 
crossed Kentucky — "that dark and bloody ground," 
— at the estate owners and pen-keepers who dwelt 
among their discontented slaves in places where the 
Maroons might easily raid ; indeed I wonder still. 
But now, in a measure I understand. During the 
war I lived not far from Woolwich arsenal, that 
magnet for German airships. Were people there 
afraid ? 

Some of us were, I suppose, but the vast majority 
grew accustomed to the alarms. So few people 
were killed even if they came every night, so few 
houses were wrecked though the night sky was 
illuminated with search-lights that we became inured to 
them. And so I suppose it was with these people who 
lived on the borders of the Maroon Country. The 
pens and estates close to the mountains were their 
homes. Here they must live, and they hoped that 
the raiding Maroons would not come their way, 
that their slaves would stand by them, and that 
they would be able to beat them off if they did ; 
that anyhow, if the worst came to the worst, help 
would come to extricate them before the savages 
were able to work their wicked will upon them. 



176 THE MAROONS 

Still, of course, the Maroons must have retarded 
the settlement of the country as Dallas says they 
undoubtedly did. 

"By degrees they became very formidable, and 
in their predatory excursions greatly distressed the 
back settlers by plundering their houses, destroying 
their cattle, and carrying off their slaves by force." 

"At first," says Dallas, "they contented them- 
selves with isolated cases of depredation, but growing 
bolder, became such a danger that the colonists 
resolved to reduce them." 

"Isolated cases of depredation" are very hard 
on those isolated cases. But when raids like this 
have been repeated twice or thrice, then even the 
colonist who did not come into contact with the 
Maroons realised that something must be done. 
The Maroons concentrated themselves under Cucljoe, 
whom we read was "a bold, skilful, and enterprising 
man, who, on assuming the command, appointed his 
brothers Accompong and Johnny leaders under him, 
and Cuffee and Quao subordinate captains. Many of 
these negroes seem to have been Koromantyns, 
runaway slaves, whom Dallas describes as " a people 
inured to war on the coast of Africa." Ashantis 
all I doubt not. 

Cudjoe had a great reputation. From the 
Maroons in the Eastern Mountains a body calling 
themselves Cottawoods broke away, and with their 
women and children joined Cudjoe by the rugged, 
inaccessible mountain paths and valleys, and Dallas 
tells of another body of black men who also cast 
in their lot with him. 

" These," says he, " were distinct in every respect, 
their figure, character, language, and country being 
different from those of the other blacks. Their 
skin is of a deeper jet than that of any other negro, 



CUD JOE— A LEADER 177 

their features resemble those of Europeans, their 
hair is of a long and soft texture like a Mulatto's 
or Quadroon's ; their form is more delicate, and 
their stature rather lower than those of the people 
they joined ; they were much handsomer to a 
European eye, but seemed not to have originally 
possessed such hardiness and strength of nerve as 
the other people under Cudjoe ; and although it is 
probable that the intercourse with the latter had 
existed between seventy and eighty years, and an 
intermixture of families had taken place, their original 
character was easily traced in their descendants. 
They were called Madagascars, but why I do not 
know, never having heard that any slaves were 
brought from the island of Madagascar. They 
said that they ran away from the settlements about 
Lacovia in the parish of St Elizabeth soon after 
the planters had bought them. It does not appear 
that their numbers were great, but they were 
remarkably prolific." 

Bridges says in much more grandiloquent 
language that a slave ship from Madagascar with 
slaves that had Malay blood in their veins was 
wrecked on the coast, and the slaves escaping joined 
the Maroons. But one thing is clear, that the blood 
of a good many races ran in the veins of these free- 
booters who held the heights for so long. It is 
quite possible there was even a little admixture of 
white blood, but not very much, for one thing was 
certain, they hated the whites — naturally. 

At first it seems Cudjoe was only regarded as 
a leader of runaway slaves ; later, as his successes 
grew and settlement among the mountains became 
more and more difficult on account of his depreda- 
tions, they decided he was a Maroon. Hidden in 
the inaccessible fastnesses of the interior, the troops 



178 THE MAROONS 

sent against him were foiled again and again. It 
was rough on those soldiers dressed in the absurd 
fashions of the time so unsuitable for the tropics, 
but once they got beyond the parade ground, I 
doubt not they accommodated themselves to circum- 
stances lightly clad in shirt and breeches. There is 
in the Jamaican Institute a fearsome erection of 
black felt and brass which says it is the headgear 
of a militia regiment in the eighteenth century, and 
is kept there as a monument to the unutterable folly 
of those who arranged for their fighting forces in 
the tropics. If everything else was ordered on like 
lines, it is not surprising that a foe who could take 
advantage of every stick and stone and tree, could 
and did easily make all the discipline a thing of 
naught. 

At first the Maroons had only desired to plunder, 
but since indiscriminate plunder could not be allowed 
in a community that was striving to be civilised, 
and they found themselves driven farther and farther 
into the woods and mountains by assailants who 
were probably not very tender towards those who fell 
into their hands, they began reprisals. 

"Murder," says Dallas, "attended all their suc- 
cesses ; not only men but women and children were 
sacrificed to their fury, and even people of their 
own colour if unconnected with them. Over such 
as secretly favoured them, while they apparently 
remained at peace on the plantations they exercised 
a dominion . . . and made them subservient to 
their designs. By these Cudjoe was always apprised 
in time of the parties that were fitted out." 

I can imagine the planters talking at their tables, 
the house servants waiting with unmoved or even 
sympathetic faces, and yet carrying the news to the 
field labourers. That would be enough. At night 



MAROON MARKSMANSHIP 179 

one of them would steal off to the mountains that 
are so near to every estate in Jamaica. They might 
not even wait for the night. A strange black 
man would not be noticeable and he might lie 
hidden in any hut. Knowing the numbers that were 
coming against them, something of their plans, and 
best of all knowing the country so thoroughly, it 
was an easy matter for Cudjoe and his lieutenants, 
escaped slaves, or descendants of slaves as they 
were, to circumvent the plans laid against them. 
Again and again the white assailants were caught 
in ambush, were slain, and — worse still for those 
who came after them — Cudjoe supplied his men 
with arms and ammunition from what they left 
behind them. It was, as a matter of fact, fairly 
easy for the Maroons to get arms and ammunition. 
The times were such that of necessity every man 
went armed and must be able to get ammunition 
easily. 

"There was no restriction," says Dallas, "in the 
sale of powder and firearms, and there can be no 
doubt that Cudjoe had friends who made a regular 
purchase of them under pretence of being hunters 
and fowlers for their masters. . . . Nay, a Maroon 
himself might, carrying a few fowls and a basket of 
provisions on his head, pass unnoticed and unknown 
through the immense crowd of negroes frequenting 
the markets in the large towns." 

And these wild men, too, had learned, taught in 
a hard school, to be careful. They never threw a 
shot away as the white men did. Every bullet with 
them was bound to find its billet. The marksman- 
ship of the Maroons became proverbial. Oh, we can 
see easily enough how it was that Cudjoe managed 
to protract the war for years. 

Things were getting desperate, something must 



180 THE MAROONS 

be done. They had not nearly enough soldiers. . . . 
But in a country like Jamaica, where slave risings 
were to be feared, whose coasts were harried by 
picaroons and corsairs, which might even expect 
descents by the French and Spaniards, there were 
the militia, and they raised easily enough independent 
companies and rangers to cope with the difficulties 
that faced the country. They even raised a body of 
negroes called Blackshot, favoured, of course, above 
the rest of their race, a body of Mulattoes who might 
perhaps reasonably be supposed to side with the 
whites, and also they brought over from Central 
America a body of Mosquito Indians. Both the 
Blackshot and the Mosquito Indians, wild or half 
wild men themselves, proved of great assistance. 
They found out the provisions grounds of Cudjoe 
and the Maroons, and many were the skirmishes 
as they drove the freebooters back, back into the 
recesses of the mountains I went up that sunny 
December morning ; but it is on record that even 
when the Maroons were defeated it was always the 
assailants who lost the more heavily. But indeed, 
seeing the country now that is partly opened up, 
so that you may stand on a well-made road and 
look down into the most desperate cockpit, I know 
that it must have taken an amazing valour to have 
penetrated at all in the old days. 

"There are," says Dallas, "parallel lines of cock- 
pits, but as their sides are often perpendicular from 
fifty to eighty feet" (looking down with the jungle 
clear from the top I should have said they were 
deeper), "a passage from one line to the other is 
scarcely found practicable to any but a Maroon. . . . 
There are trees in the glens and the entrance of the 
defiles is woody. In some water is found." They 
were almost impregnable those fastnesses. But out 



HARRYING THE MAROONS 181 

of these defiles the Maroons had to come in search 
of provisions and the sharp-sighted guides, Mosquito 
Indians and other black men on the white men's 
side, easily detected the paths all converging on the 
same place. It might be a defile so narrow that for 
half a mile men could only pass through in single 
file. The Maroons knew as well as their assailants 
that these paths that led into their impregnable 
defiles were tell-tale, and they made use of them. 
Always they were informed of the approach of a 
body of militia and soldiers. It was a fact hardly 
to be concealed, and in the dense vegetation sur- 
rounding the entrance to the particular cockpit to 
be attacked they established a line of marksmen, 
two sometimes if the width of the ground admitted 
of it. They were well hidden by the roots of trees, 
by the thick screen of greenery, by the rocks and 
stones. As soon as the assailants, panting, breath- 
less, fatigued from the terrible climb that lay behind 
them, approached from their concealment they let 
fly a volley, and if the forces, who did not lack 
courage, turned to fire at the spot where they saw 
the smoke they received a volley in another direction ; 
prepared to charge that, they received a volley from 
the mouth of the glen, and then the enemy having 
done all the damage they could retired, unhurt and 
triumphant in proportion as their assailants were 
bitter and downhearted, for always they left some 
of their number dead on the field and carried away 
wounded. 

But the harrying nevertheless worried the 
Maroons. They had to find some place where they 
could grow their provisions and keep their women 
and children in safety, for it was not always possible 
to raid the plantations exactly when they wanted 
once the white men were on guard. Deeper and 

N 



182 THE MAROONS 

deeper into the mountains they retreated, but Cudjoe 
was a man of judgment. Taking up his position 
in the cockpits on the borders of St James and 
Trelawny, among some of the steepest, mountainous 
country in Jamaica, he commanded the parishes of 
St James, Hanover, Westmoreland, and St Elizabeth. 
He could thus obtain abundant supplies, and with 
his brother Accompong in the mountains overlook- 
ing the Black River, where even though there were 
more defenders for the plantations there were still 
more abundant supplies to be had, he made his 
people very excellent headquarters. At the bottom 
of the Petty River cockpit they had a supply of 
water and ground whereon they could grow yams 
and cassava and corn, so that they always had some- 
thing to fall back upon and they therefore could 
choose their own time for coming out. So great a 
general was this poor runaway negro that in eight 
or ten years he had united all the stray bands of 
wandering slaves and terrorised the country-side. 

"In their inroads," says Dallas, "they exercised 
the most horrid barbarities. The weak and defence- 
less whenever surprised by them fell victims to their 
thirst for blood ; and though some were more humane 
than others, all paid implicit obedience to the com- 
mand of a leader when that was given to imbrue 
their hands in blood ; murder once commenced no 
chief ever had power to stay the hand of his meanest 
follower, and there is hardly an instance of a prisoner 
being saved by them." The Maroons have been 
accused of torturing their prisoners, but Dallas is 
sure they were so keen on killing that when they 
did take an unfortunate they were only too eager 
to cut off his head with their cutlasses or machetes, 
and doubtless many a wounded man was so 
despatched. We can hardly blame them for show- 



DIFFICULTY OF GETTING IN TOUCH 183 

ing no mercy. They were only untaught savages 
and assuredly no mercy was ever shown them. 

By 1739 the position of affairs was intolerable, 
and Governor Trelawny was determined to rid the 
colony of the ever-present menace. A considerable 
number of the soldiers and militia were collected 
and sent up these heights to surround all the paths 
to the Maroon settlements. And then, seeing there 
was little prospect of frightening the Maroons into 
submission, it was decided to make peace and to 
range the enemy on the side of the whites. For 
it must be remembered there were three parties 
in Jamaica, all antagonistic, whites, slaves, and 
Maroons. This idea was hailed with enthusiasm, 
as it seemed that the holding of the Maroons within 
bounds was likely to be no easier as the years 
went on, and their conquest was wellnigh impossible. 
In fact, they were better as friends than as enemies. 
Whatever they had done was best forgotten, and 
the Government declared themselves ready to cry 
quits. 

The difficulty was to get within touch, and to 
make these people who had been hunted and harried 
all their lives believe this extraordinary thing. They 
could hardly be expected to realise the position, 
and it was just as well they should not. For in 
the face of a slave population that were as tinder 
beside the flame, failure would be fatal. The prestige 
of the white man would be gone. 

And for this same reason, whatever was done 
must be done quickly. Colonels Guthrie and Sadler 
in command were instructed to move with what 
despatch they might. But, though the Maroons 
were as weary of the war as their opponents, it 
was difficult to get speech with Cudjoe and to make 
him believe that peace was in the air when they 



184 THE MAROONS 

did get speech with him. For he was a cautious 
man, this negro leader. 

When he saw the force brought against him 
he collected his men in a spot most suitable for his 
mode of warfare, placing them upon ledges of rock 
that rose almost perpendicularly to a great height 
surrounding a plain which narrowed into a passage 
upon which the whole force could bring their arms 
to bear. This passage contracted into a defile half 
a mile long, and it would have been the simplest 
thing for the Maroons to cut off a party entering 
it, for it was so narrow that party must march in 
single file. For long afterwards it was known as 
Guthrie's defile. In the dell behind, secured by 
other cockpits behind it again, were collected the 
Maroon women and children, and on the open ground 
before the defile the men had erected their huts, 
which were called Maroon Town, or Cudjoe's Town, 
and in a moment they could have flown to the rock 
ledges. And even if the town had been burnt it 
would not have been a very grave loss, just a town 
of wattle and posts, such as they build even now 
on the Gambia, with a grass or palm leaf thatch. 
And all around were stationed men in the hills with 
horns made generally of conch shells, and in those 
days a negro could say a good deal with a horn, 
even as in Africa now he can send a message 
hundreds of miles by tapping a tom-tom. 

So Colonel Guthrie advanced towards this 
redoubtable hill stronghold, seeing nothing but dense 
greenery and outcrops of rock, and hearing all round 
him the sound of negro horns, now soft and low, 
welcoming, beseeching, now loud and threatening, 
daring him to come farther, now with a shrill wild 
clangour, warning those behind that the white man 
was come in force. But he advanced very slowly, 



A BRAVE MAN 185 

making all the signs he could that he came in peace. 
On he came, on and on, and there must have been 
some amongst his followers who feared lest he risked 
too much, and some who, seeing he had got so far 
unmolested, would gladly have risked all and made 
a dash for the huts, whose grey smoke they could 
see streaming up in the clear morning air above the 
dense greenery. 

But Colonel Guthrie held them all, and, stretching 
out his hand, he called out that he came in peace, 
that he had come by the Governor's orders to make 
them an offer of peace, and that the white people 
eagerly desired it. If the Maroons had only known 
it, it was a great confession of failure on the part 
of the arrogant whites. Back came the answer in 
negro jargon that the Maroons too desired peace, and 
they begged that the troops might be kept back. They 
had reverted to savagedom, these people; the men were 
warriors and hunters, having from two to six wives, 
who tilled the ground as well as bore the children. 
I can imagine what a danger they must have been, 
set in the midst of a slave population ; for one thing, 
they were always ready to carry off the black women. 
And now Colonel Guthrie had come to put an end 
to it all. 

He shouted that he would send someone to them 
to show the confidence he had in their sincerity, and 
to explain the terms of peace. 

To this they agreed, and Dr Eussell was elected 
for the purpose, and a brave man he must have been. 

"He advanced very confidently towards their 
huts," says the historian, "near which he was met 
by two Maroons, whom he informed of the purport 
of his message and asked if either of them were 
Cudjoe." They were not Cud joe, but they promised 
him if no one followed him lie should see the negro 



186 THE MAROONS 

leader. The horns had ceased. All on that mountain- 
side were awaiting the great event. The two men 
called out in the Koromantyn language, and upon 
all the surrounding rocks and ledges and fallen trees 
appeared the warriors. Very like the Ashanti of 
to-day they probably were with fierce dark faces, 
their wool brushed back above the sloping forehead 
and gleaming white teeth, with necklaces of seeds 
or bones or beads about their necks and machetes, 
and sometimes long muskets in their hands. And 
the white messenger stood there and addressed 
them, they were supposed to understand English 
and probably did understand the gist of his speech. 
He said that Cudjoe was a brave and a good man, 
and he was sure he would come down and show 
a disposition to live in peace and friendliness with 
the white people. 

The negro chief had driven them to woo him with 
soft words, and he did not understand the greatness 
of his victory, or perhaps he would have driven a 
harder bargain. 

Several Maroons came forward, amongst them 
one whom it was easy to see was their leader. 
And behold the great negro chief who had kept 
the country at bay, for whose reduction regiments 
had been sent from England, was a monstrous 
misshaped dwarf, humpbacked, with strongly marked 
African features, "and a peculiar wildness in his 
manner." He was clad in rags. He had on the 
tattered remains of an old blue coat, of which the 
skirts and the sleeves below the elbows were missing, 
round his head was a dirty white cloth, so dirty 
it was difficult to realise its original colour, a pair 
of loose drawers that did not reach the knees 
covered his substantial short legs, and he wore a 
hat that was only a crown, for the rim had long 



A NEGRO CHIEFTAIN 187 

since gone. A bag of large slugs and a cow's horn 
full of powder was slung on his right side, and 
on his left, hung by a narrow leather strap under 
his arm, a sharp knife, or as they called it then, a 
"mushet" or "couteau." A miserable savage after 
all was the great negro chief, and all his person 
was smeared with the red earth of the cockpits. 
Neither he nor his followers had a shirt to their 
names, though all had guns and cutlasses. 

And the squat, dwarf-like chieftain who had held 
up the island was nervous. Facing the white man, 
who looked down upon him, he shifted uneasily as a 
negro would, and at last Russell offered to change 
hats with him — a brave man indeed, but the island 
was in straits ! Upon this the Maroons came down 
armed, and Colonel Guthrie and the other white 
men came forward unarmed, and Colonel Guthrie 
held out his hand. The emotional African seized 
it and kissed it — he must have been a slave once, 
he knew so well what the white men expected — and 
threw himself on the ground, embracing Colonel 
Guthrie's knees, kissing his feet, and asking his 
pardon. He was humble, penitent, abject, clearly 
he did not understand the situation. And the rest 
of the Maroons, following the example of their 
chieftain, prostrated themselves, and the long dreaded 
black freebooters were won over to the side of the 
white people. 

Then and there upon that mountain-side it was 
decreed that henceforward all hostilities between 
the Maroons and the whites should cease "for ever," 
they said grandiloquently, that all the Maroons 
except those who had joined during the past 
two years should live in a state of freedom and 
liberty, that even the exceptions should have full 
pardon if they were willing to return to their former 



188 THE MAROONS 

masters, and even if they did not wish to return, 
"they shall remain in subjection to Captain Cudjoe, 
and in friendship with us." 

Oh, it was a glorious victory — for the Maroons ! 

They were to have all the lands round Trelawny 
Town and the cockpits, with liberty to plant and 
dispose of their increase, and they might hunt 
wherever they thought fit, provided they did not 
come within three miles of "any penn, settlement, 
or crawle," which seems to have been a privilege 
they could easily take, whether the white people 
liked it or not. 

In their turn, they bound themselves to help put 
down any rebellion, or to help against any foreign 
invasion, a white man was to live amongst them, 
and they were to bring back runaway negroes. And 
finally, it was required of them that Captain Cudjoe 
and his successors were to wait on the Governor or 
Commander-in-Chief at least once a year. 

And there was another Maroon victory, this time 
scored by the Windward Maroons in the east of the 
colony. These were under Quao, and as communica- 
tion with Cudjoe's party was difficult, they knew 
nothing of the peace that had been made. A party 
of soldiers was sent out against them ; these soldiers 
were new to the hills. For three days they wandered 
through the densely wooded mountain-land, and then 
they came upon the footsteps of men and dogs, saw 
the smoke of fires, and arrived at seventy houses 
with a fire burning in each, and jerked hog still 
broiling upon the coals. 

It never occurred to them that such houses were 
of little value, easily made, for the material lay all 
around, and that the woods abounded in pigs. They 
were better used to the parade ground than to 
the woodland, and they saw nothing strange or 



FIGHT WITH THE WINDWARD MAROONS 189 

sinister in the fact that those in flight had left a 
trail that even they could follow, and so they went 
on blindly, till suddenly, as they were laboriously 
making their way down to the sea, the Maroons 
fell upon their rear. 

"The militia fled," says Dallas, "and the baggage 
negroes to the number of seventy threw down their 
loads and followed. The regulars took shelter 
under the perpendicular projection of a mountain 
that overhung the stream, whence they could hear 
the Maroons talking, though they could see nothing 
of them. In this situation, almost hid from the 
enemy, they remained four hours up to their waists 
in water, exposed to the heat of a vertical sun and 
apprehensive of being taken alive and tortured." 

They had fired at the smoke of the Maroon guns, 
and by this means got rid of all their ammunition, 
but they were safe enough where they were so long 
as the enemy did not come directly in front. At 
last, when a shot was fired from that direction it 
seemed to them they must get away at all costs, 
and they made a dash across the river which brought 
the whole of the Maroon marksmen upon them. 
Their dead they abandoned, which was right enough, 
but they abandoned their wounded also. Harassed, 
fatigued, defeated men, they fled back to the quarters 
in St George's they had left with such high hopes 
three days before. 

And those who were left behind ? The Maroons 
probably came down and butchered them, but one 
man certainly told them of the peace made with 
Cudjoe's Maroons in the west. It seemed to them 
hardly likely, but they debated whether they should 
spare his life and send him to the Governor an 
emissary, to say that they too would like to come 
in on the same terms. Poor soldier of the eighteenth 



190 THE MAROONS 

century, whose name even we do not know. 
Quao and his leading men were rather in favour of 
sending him. But the soldier's evil star was in the 
ascendant. There arose an Obeah woman, and 
she declared that the powers of darkness demanded 
the life of the white man who had fallen into their 
hands, and they struck off his head with a machete. 

Again the Government decided this was an 
enemy who were too strong for them, and three 
months later Captain Adair went out with another 
party, not to fight but to make peace. By the 
purest accident they captured a horn-man, and him 
they told of the offer, dealing with him gently, probably 
greatly to his surprise. And from him they heard 
how the Maroons had discussed the news told by 
the luckless soldier. Since by a miracle it was true, 
he agreed gladly to lead the soldiers to their town, 
only impressing upon them how impossible it would 
be to take it by force. Captain Adair gave himself 
up to the guidance of the horn-man. And the story 
of Cudjoe and the Western Maroons was repeated, 
only Captain Adair had not so great a difficulty in 
convincing the savage warriors of his good intention. 
The massacred soldier had helped him greatly there. 

"After some parley they agreed to exchange a 
captain for the purposes of settling preliminaries." 

That savage leader must have been an artist. 
There was a touch of true drama in the way he 
staged the scene. No sooner had these things been 
agreed upon than the Maroons, each with a stroke 
of his machete, cleared more than an acre of light 
brushwood on the side of the mountain and so 
exposed to the view of the soldiers the whole body 
of savage warriors ranged on the slope in order of 
battle. 

Standing thus, the two parties came to an agree- 



"BUCKRA! BUCKRA!" 191 

ment, and not till that was done were the soldiers 
allowed to enter the town with their drums beating. 

The horn-man was right. It would have been 
wellnigh impossible to take that town, for as they 
climbed up one steep hill and down another they 
noted the holes dug to cover the defenders, and the 
crossed sticks for resting the guns with which they 
had enfiladed every angle, that from the steepness it 
was necessary to make in ascending. 

But the white men by favour were in the town 
and they left there a Lieutenant Thicknesse as a 
hostage, and he told afterwards that Quao's chil- 
dren could not refrain from striking their pointed 
fingers at his breast as they would have done knives, 
calling "Buckra! Buckra!" The women, he says, 
wore by way of decoration necklaces of human teeth, 
which they declared were white men's, and the jaw- 
bone of the unfortunate who had brought the first 
intelligence of Cudjoe's peace adorned one of their 
horns, a truly Ashanti way of making memorial of a 
slain ambassador. 

And thus the white men came to terms with the 
Maroons of the east as they had done with those 
of the west, and the weary island breathed freely 
and sighing, said at least they had disposed of one 
danger — and so they had — for more than fifty years. 
That is to say, the white people of Jamaica had 
adapted themselves to the thorn which was for ever 
in their side. 

The Maroons, they say, far excelled in strength 
and symmetry all the other negroes in Jamaica. 
They were blacker, taller and handsomer. Once 
they were at peace, the life of a Maroon was far 
from being unhappy, even though white men lived 
among them nominally to rule them. Their moun- 
tain homes were cool and healthy, fully ten or fifteen 



192 THE MAROONS 

degrees of temperature below that of Montego Bay 
or Falmouth, and the surroundings were lovely. 

From the mountain-side where we dwelt at the 
Hyde, we looked out over wooded hill and valley, 
coconut palms cut the sky-line, in the deeper hollows 
was the vivid green of sugar cane, and the bottoms 
between the hills were pasture land whereon were 
mules and horses and cattle, red and white. Always 
it was hill and dale, woodland and pasture, and 
flamboyant trees made splashes of gorgeous colour, 
there were clumps of dark green pimento trees like 
the myrtle groves wherein the gods of ancient Greece 
held high revel, there were orange trees and lemon 
trees with golden fruit and white blossoms that filled 
the air with fragrance ; by moonlight it was fairyland 
and with the dawn all along the valleys and low- 
lands and in the clefts of the hills lay a fleecy, soft 
grey mist, the softest, tenderest mist that refreshed 
the land and added to its luxuriant fertility. And 
a little higher up, standing beneath a symmetrical 
broad leaf or a giant cotton tree, it was possible to 
see the blue Caribbean flecked with white waves or 
stilly reflecting the cloudless blue sky above. A 
lovely land the Maroons had for themselves for all 
time, and they loved it these long lithe warrior slaves 
with the quick wild and fiery eyes. But savages they 
were, and it was to keep some sort of check upon 
them that a white superintendent with helpers was 
set to live amongst them. Principally it seemed he 
was there to see that they did not maintain too 
friendly relations with the slaves from the planta- 
tions. He was bound to reside in the town, from 
which he could not be absent longer than a fort- 
night, and every three months he had to make a 
return on oath to the Governor of the number 
residing in his town, how many were able to bear 



LAWS FOR THE MAROONS 193 

arms, how many were fit for duty, the number of 
women and children, their increase and decrease. 

So the white people kept in touch with their 
former enemies. 

And the principal job of those enemies was to 
bring in runaways. They did that undoubtedly, 
and presently a law was passed allowing not only 
the usual reward, but a little extra if the slave was 
brought in alive. 

They might have dances among themselves, and 
provided the dance was in the daytime with a small 
number of slaves. But the slaves were not to gather 
in Maroon Town and they were not to hold slaves 
of their own. 

And lest they should be a danger to the country 
no party in pursuit of runaways was to consist of 
more than twelve men and was not to remain out 
more than twenty days, and before they went out 
they had to be provided with a written order from 
their superintendent. They were not to be em- 
ployed by any white person without a written agree- 
ment and they were not to be whipped or otherwise 
ill-treated, and as they increased fast they had the 
right to relinquish their rights as Maroons and to 
live elsewhere in the island as free blacks. 

Some of these laws had very little attention paid 
them. They kept slaves and' bought them, they 
wandered about the island apparently wherever they 
chose, and many of them formed temporary connec- 
tions with the women on the plantations. And so 
slack were they in their search for runaways that a 
large body of these emulated the Maroons them- 
selves, and lived for over twenty years in the heart 
of the mountains between the eastern and the western 
Maroons. 

The planters made no objections to their con- 



194 THE MAROONS 

nections with tbeir slaves, for the children of such 
connections belonged to them and were likely to 
have the strength and vigour of their fathers. But 
though the Maroons left these children in bondage 
as carelessly as did the whites in like case, still the 
connections thus formed must have broken away in 
a small measure the bitterness that was supposed 
to exist between the Maroon and the slave, and 
every child by his very vigour deepened the danger 
that for ever threatened the planters. 

However, it was peace between the planters and 
the black freebooters, nominally at least for over 
fifty years. Doubtless there was much friction and 
discontent, but things always quieted down, till in 
1795 the smouldering fire broke into flames again. 

The causes of the second Maroon war as given 
by Dallas and others point to gross mismanagement 
on the part of someone, but we can hardly judge now 
of the provocation on either side. 

Anyhow, there was trouble with the super- 
intendent, a white man whom the Maroons liked 
and trusted, but who apparently was so slack he 
was away from his post for weeks at a time, and 
the Government suspended him and placed another 
man in his place. Then two Maroons, whom the 
Maroons openly said they counted of little worth, 
stole some hogs, and were apprehended and taken 
to Montego Bay and given thirty-nine lashes by — 
and there lay the sting for the unconquered Maroons 
— a common slave in the workhouse. 

This was strongly resented and the Maroons 
threw out their new superintendent, and we can 
imagine the excitement and dismay in Montego Bay 
when the dismissed man came riding down the 
mountains. The inhabitants doubtless looked with 
relief upon the grey stone walls of the fort that 



A MAROON OF EXQUISITE SYMMETRY 195 

overlooked the bay, and took care to have in order 
those stout stone houses with walls over two feet 
thick. I have lived in one of them. Those walls 
certainly would have been a protection against a 
savage foe. 

The militia were called out and moved forward 
into the woods. So small is the island, so close 
they were, that Maroon Town can only have been 
about seventeen miles from Montego Bay, even 
taking into account all the hairpin-turns, and it 
was nothing like that as the crow flies. 

It can hardly have been pleasant to have a 
band of bloodthirsty savages so close, and here the 
sycophant Bridges, who for some reason does not 
spare Lord Balcarres, the new Governor of the 
island, and blamed him for the second Maroon war, 
becomes quite poetical on the subject of the meeting 
of the militia with the enemy. 

"The militia," he says, "moved forward to the 
supposed scene of action and were met in the woods 
by a Maroon of exquisite symmetry and noble 
address, who descended the side of the mountain 
with the step of an antelope, and giving a wild 
and graceful flourish to his lance presented a letter 
requesting a conference with the chief magistrate 
of the district and with certain other individuals 
whom it named. The proposal was accepted and 
their terms heard." 

They wanted their superintendent back and they 
got him, and they had all the children in their town 
baptized as an evidence of good faith ; they went 
further still, and when the authorities requested 
their leaders to come in, they came in, thirty-nine 
of them, came in peace, and those same authorities, 
who vowed all they desired was peace, promptly 
bound the hands of all but old Montague the chief 



196 THE MAROONS 

behind them, marched them through the streets of 
the town with crowds of slaves jeering at them and 
shut them up in Mont ego Bay jail. To be behind 
any walls must have been hard ; for these free 
mountaineers to be confined in an eighteenth century 
jail in summer in the tropics must have been a 
purgatory for which we can have no words. One 
of them put an end to his life by tearing out his 
bowels. Yet so utterly blind were the authorities 
that they took two of the men and sent them back 
to their own people "to induce them to surrender!" 
It doubtless came as a surprise to the whites 
that these two messengers instead of recommending 
instant surrender did exactly the opposite. At any 
rate, "upon the report they made of the reception 
and treatment of the thirty-seven, the Maroons, far 
from following the others" (I am quoting Dallas) 
"immediately set fire to both their towns." When 
they surrendered in 1739, their numbers did not 
exceed 600, but when the second war broke out 
they had increased to over 1400, and when we 
remember that they dwelt among impregnable 
mountains and held the back settlers at their mercy, 
we can understand in a measure the divided councils 
that led to the war. Many men thought nothing 
was too bad for a Maroon, and it would be safer to 
extirpate them. They would have treated them as 
we treat dangerous vermin, killed them whenever 
and wherever they got the chance. We have only 
to read Bridges thirty years later to know how some 
of the colonists thought of the men with African 
blood in their veins. 

" They had not been watched with that vigilance 
which African perfidy requires," says Bridges, speaking 
of the slaves in one place, and what applied to the 
slaves applied still more to the Maroons. Everyone 



BUSH FIGHTING 197 

felt they must be coerced. They were a danger to 
the country, and while I sympathise with them very 
strongly, I think they were. Undoubtedly, apart 
from any particular provocation, if Jamaica were 
to be held as a slave country, these 1400 free black 
people dwelling in the heart of her mountains had 
to be subdued at any cost. They were talking of 
the Abolition of the Slave Trade in England, and 
doubtless the planters feared the effect of such talk 
both upon their slaves and the Maroons, should they 
come to hear of it. 

"These insolent savages must be subdued," said 
the colony with the Governor at their head, and 
accordingly, unmindful of the lessons of over fifty 
years ago, set out to subdue them by the old methods. 
But there were roads up to Maroon Town now, roads 
made and kept open by the Maroons themselves, 
roads winding and narrow, cut along the hillside 
among the tropical greenery ; the mango and easily - 
grown bamboo, the beautiful ackee with its bright 
green leaves and brilliant red pods, orange trees, 
the dark green coffee with its fragrant white flower, 
and annotto with its clusters of ruby berries. But 
the soldiers noticed none of these things. They 
went up and up, and they must have found it very 
hard work in August. 

Their leader, Colonel Sandford, knew little enough 
about bush fighting, but he was joined by Mr 
Robertson, the Commanding Officer at Fort Dalling 
and the owner of a pen in the neighbourhood, and 
he brought with him a Trelawny Town Maroon 
named Thomas, who undertook to act as guide to 
the white forces and faithfully carried out his pact. 
Colonel Sandford got so far that he saw the Maroons 
on the heights between their town and Schaw Castle, 
a pen in the mountains, and probably would have 

o 



198 THE MAROONS 

been content with his success had he not received 
from Lord Balcarres an order to take New Town. 
The way was a long defile between the mountains, 
and just at the hour of sunset he entered it at the 
head of his dragoons. The enemy let them get 
well into the defile, the column was half its length, 
and when it had gone two-thirds of the way they let 
off, all down the left of that column from one end to 
the other in the darkening light, a tremendous volley 
of small arms, they themselves being hidden from 
sight by trees and rocks. It was the old, old tactics 
of Cudjoe that you would have thought the island 
men at least might have expected. But in Cudjoe's 
day there had been no roads. Perhaps it was that 
well-made road that deceived them. 

There was only one thing to be done ; they must 
reach the open spaces round the town out of reach 
of these marksmen hidden behind the trees. They 
quickened their pace, urged on by the cries of the 
wounded and groans of the dying. Luckily, in the 
uncertain light the marksmanship had not been very 
good, or I do not know how anyone could have 
escaped. Then, just as they reached Old Town there 
was another shot, and Colonel Sandford fell. He 
was dead. And the wildest panic ensued. At least 
this is what Dallas says. There was but one thought 
uppermost in their minds — to get away. Un- 
doubtedly they could have held the town had there 
been anyone whom they trusted to lead them, and 
undoubtedly they made no such effort. There was 
no one whose orders they would obey. The darkness 
gave them just the help they needed. In the murk 
and pouring rain they squelched their way down 
the slippery mountain paths, sure that dragoons were 
totally unfitted for mountain warfare, and so overjoyed 
at their escape from a handful of savages that they 



A RIOTOUS SCENE 199 

fired off their muskets, made a tremendous row, and 
generally misbehaved themselves. It is all very well 
to think scorn of them now, but the densely-wooded 
mountains were terrible, they had seen their leader 
fall and they were certainly both by training and 
equipment totally unfitted to cope with savages 
on the warpath. 

That night there was a riotous scene. Lord 
Balcarres, we are told, having slipped on a plank 
made slippery by the rain had "a contusion over 
the eye," if he hadn't been a lord and the Governor 
it would have been a black eye, and it might well 
have been attributed to another cause. But it did 
not add to his beauty, and the soldiers rushing into 
the camp wild with delight at having escaped, made 
such an uproar that only the Governor could cope 
with it. The night, indeed, was disgraceful to both 
sides, for the Maroons, instead of following up their 
very great success, retired to their town and recruited 
their spirits with such copious draughts of rum as 
made them "frantic and desperate." Sixty of them 
by their own account lay in a state of insensibility 
till two o'clock the next day, when with the assist- 
ance of the women and the less intoxicated men 
they were removed to the cockpits of Petit River. 
Had the troops gone up that morning, more than a 
fourth of the young Maroon melt must have fallen 
into their hands. 

"It is much to be regretted," says Dallas, who 
wrote within seven years of the catastrophe, and at 
least must have known something of the general talk, 
"that the panic by which the troops were hurried 
away to headquarters prevented their occupying the 
site of the Old Town after they were in possession 
of it, and might have maintained it without resist- 
ance. The immediate encamping there would not 



200 THE MAROONS 

only have saved the lives of many who died of their 
wounds, or through fatigue, but would have left on 
the minds of the Maroons an impression that even 
their denies were not to be depended on ; whereas 
abandoning the town was giving them a triumph 
and confirming their reliance on their position." 

In this disastrous affair there fell Colonel Sand- 
ford of the dragoons, Colonel Gallimore of the 
militia, fifteen dragoons, thirteen militia, eight volun- 
teers and not a single Maroon. No wonder they 
celebrated a victory. It is to the credit of the 
Maroons that none of the wounded were taken and 
put to torture, but most died where they fell or 
crawled into the woods and died for want of the 
help that was not forthcoming, although they were 
within so short a distance of the town on the sea- 
shore below, and close to so many pens and planta- 
tions. Colonel Gallimore's body was never found, 
and though the Maroons yielded up watches, knives, 
pencils, and other things from the dead and wounded, 
nothing of his was ever forthcoming. So it is thought 
he must have been wounded and crawling away, 
favoured by the coming darkness, have found some 
retreat where he died for want of care. Dallas says 
he was a brave, active man much beloved, but he was 
never seen again, and the dense woodlands of the 
cockpits have never so far as I know yielded up 
their secrets. 

Things could not be left so. It was resolved to 
surround the scene of action, and they called up 
reinforcements, 100 men from the 62nd Regiment, a 
detachment of the 17th Light Dragoons and large 
bodies of militia. The soldiers could and did get at 
the provision grounds and destroy them, though all 
round they could hear the weird blowing of the 
Maroon horns, mournful, threatening, even trium- 



CHINTZ NIGHTGOWNS 201 

phant and defiant. They were not beaten, they 
were not going to be beaten, said those horns. 
"Wait till we get you!" and then the angry 
soldiers fired into the gullies at random, and the 
mountains echoed and re-echoed to the noise of 
the discharge, and the Maroons were not a penny 
the worse, for even the destruction of their provision 
grounds did not worry them over much. They knew 
where to get fresh supplies. 

And it rained and rained and rained. In these 
mountains where it is lush and green and the 
vegetation grows riotously, there is sometimes as 
much as 30 inches of rain in a month. All the paths 
were slimy and slippery, every overhanging branch 
held a heavy shower-bath, the men were soaked to 
their skins again and again, laying the foundation as 
everyone believed of all the deadly fevers with which 
the country was credited. 

The only comfort they had was that things were 
a little disturbing to the enemy too, for hidden in 
the bush the attacking party found various trunks 
containing articles of linen and plate, the result of 
raids on the plantations, and many of the dragoons 
up here in the rain furnished themselves with chintz 
nightgowns. I like that last touch. Yet all the 
time the Maroons were so close in the jungle they 
could hear the orders given but did not attack, 
because they feared the white men were too far in 
to run away and were in such numbers they, the 
Maroons, could not escape if driven to bay. 

But having conceded so much to the valour of 
the white men, they did pretty much as they pleased, 
even passing the soldiers camped at Vaughansfield 
at eleven o'clock one night and burning the buildings 
on a pen only six miles away on the road to Montego 
Bay. There was consternation in Montego Bay and 



202 THE MAROONS 

thankfulness, that at least headquarters was between 
the town and the dreaded enemy. The raid quickened 
up the preparations, they dragged guns up the steep 
and slippery defiles that converged upon the Old 
Town, found no Maroons there, though round in 
the mountains the horns were calling defiance, and 
they recovered the bodies of Colonel Sandford and 
eighteen of those who had fallen with him. 

Lord Balcarres grew tired of this unprofitable 
warfare and went back to Montego Bay, and, extra- 
ordinary as it seems now, they put a price on the 
heads of Palmer and Parkinson, the men who had 
been sent back to tell the other Maroons what had 
happened to the thirty- seven men who had come in, 
for they said these men had instigated the rebellion. 
But that these two always denied. They always 
maintained that when the Maroons heard what had 
happened to their messengers of peace, each man of 
his own accord set fire to his house, determined to 
die rather than come in. 

And so bitter were they, not unnaturally, that 
a captain of Accompong Maroons, who had gone by 
a secret path to persuade them to surrender, was 
promptly shot because they feared he knew too much 
about the approaches to their strongholds. 

The great mistake probably lay in bringing in 
soldiers who could know nothing of the difficulties 
of the country. There must have been many stal- 
wart young men, in fact we know there were, who 
were expert hunters and woodsmen and fully com- 
petent to deal with such an enemy. The difficulty was 
the leader. Brave men were a drug in the market, 
a clever leader almost impossible to find. Counsels 
were always divided. A soldier fresh from Europe 
or from the parade ground clearly was not the right 
man, but it always ended in a soldier being chosen. 



A CALL FROM THE HILLS 203 

When Lord Balcarres gave up a command which 
did not seem likely to cover him with glory, he 
handed it over to Colonel Fitch, and General Reid 
came and occupied the quarters at Vaughansfield 
with detachments of militia from the St James, 
Hanover and Westmoreland regiments. They 
marched and they counter-marched, and the militia 
quarrelled with the regulars and they both consumed 
an immense amount of ammunition and food, but 
came no nearer to getting those Maroons. And 
still it rained and the militia grew sick of the 
fruitless job, declared they had work on their 
plantations that must be attended to — the companies 
were relieved every fortnight, and it grew more and 
more difficult to collect men to take their place. 
And Colonel Fitch with the aid of slaves set about 
the clearing of the country as well as he was able, 
but it was a job that is not finished yet, so he only 
got a little done, and the Maroons used to come into 
the hills above his quarters and call him, and at last 
he responded to their call and they told him they 
only wanted a free pardon and a promise that they 
should not be sent from the island. This seemed to 
him reasonable enough and he promised to do what 
he could for them, and allowed two of them to go 
on a safe conduct to visit their friends imprisoned at 
Montego Bay. 

It was a wrong move. The Governor, dreading 
lest the Maroons should raid the little town, had 
had the prisoners moved to a vessel in the bay for 
their better security, and the men returned reporting 
that they were in a ship and were evidently going to 
be taken away. From that time no more Maroons 
visited Colonel Fitch ; they were prepared to die 
for their freedom. 

But in true barbaric fashion they saw to it that 



204 THE MAROONS 

a goodly company should attend them across the 
river. Colonel Fitch, preparatory to an assault, set 
gangs of slaves to clear the ground with companies 
of militia to guard them, and the Maroons laid an 
ambush and killed ten of the slaves and six of the 
militia, so that I presume clearing away undergrowth 
was popular neither with soldiers nor bondsmen. 
This certainly set the slaves against the Maroons. 
The militia were already as hostile as was possible. 
I cannot say too often it was an awful country. 
There was a certain Captain Lee who commanded 
an advance post set in the dense jungle and fenced 
by high palisades, and he complained that from the 
hillsides above the Maroons could shoot into it, and 
he asked Colonel Fitch to move it. Accordingly 
Colonel Fitch, bent on seeing things for himself, 
with Colonel Jackson and several other officers, 
and accompanied by two Accompong Maroons went 
to inspect. The Accompongs did not like the job. 
They declared the Maroons were too close, and 
pointed out where they had thrown away the heads 
of wild cocos and eddoes, broad-leaved plants, and 
the leaves were not yet withered. But the white 
men, with incredible folly which perhaps does them 
credit, were unwilling to go back before they had 
accomplished something, and, persuading Colonel 
Fitch to allow them to go ahead, Colonel Jackson 
and one or two others went on, still accompanied 
by the unwilling Accompongs, and followed slowly 
by the Commanding Officer till they came to a place 
where the road forked. They were descending now 
so steep a declivity that they could only go one 
at a time, holding on by their hands. Then history 
repeated itself. There was a tremendous volley of 
small arms, an officer named Brisset was seen 
staggering among the bushes, both the Accompongs 



THE DYING LEADER 205 

fell dead, and Colonel Jackson ran back on ground 
lower than the path. We can see him stooping 
low to escape possible shots, taking all advantage 
he could of the cover till he came back to Colonel 
Fitch, seated on a fallen tree, his arm supported 
by a projecting stump and his head resting on his 
hand. Once more the Maroons had got the 
Commander-in-Chief. The blood was trickling from 
the middle of his waistcoat, and the short red and 
brown striped linen jacket which he wore stuck out 
behind "as if a rib had been broken." Such was 
Colonel Jackson's description. He was mortally 
wounded. Jackson caught his hand. 

"It is Jackson, your friend Jackson. Look at 
me," and he drew out a dagger, saying that he should 
not fall alive into the hands of the Maroons and 
he would die with him rather than leave him. 
Remember, they all feared torture. The dying man 
turned his face towards his friend (he was at peace 
with all men now, even with the Maroons) and looked 
at him kindly, though he was past speech, and then 
Jackson heard the cocking of guns, click, click, click, 
one after another, horribly close, and called to the 
soldiers to lie down, and tried to drag his friend 
down beside him. But Fitch resisted, turning his 
head as if he too would have spoken to the men, 
and so, though little harm was done to the men 
who had obeyed the order promptly, their dying 
leader was shot again through the forehead and 
there was no need for Jackson to consider his 
condition any longer. 

It was a great victory for the Maroons. Several 
of the party were killed and many more wounded, 
among them the Captain Lee, who had come in 
because his little palisaded fort was hardly tenable. 
Colonel Jackson collected the men from Lee's post 



20G THE MAROONS 

and took them all back to Colonel Fitch's quarters, 
where one died the next morning and Captain Lee 
a day or two later. Eight altogether were killed 
and seven wounded, but none were more regretted 
than Colonel Fitch. We are told he was tall and 
graceful, and a charming young man. 

"He threw around his hut," says Dallas, using 
the language of the time, "a certain elegance that 
bespoke the gentleman. His private virtues endeared 
him to his friends to whom his death was a deep 
wound." 

Great was the consternation in Jamaica, for riot 
was let loose in the mountains. Seventy men were 
dead and twenty-three were wounded. Listen to 
the tale of rapine. Brook's, House was burnt ; Schaw 
Castle was burnt ; Bandon was burnt ; Shand's was 
burnt ; Stephen and Bernard's House was burnt ; 
Kenmure was burnt and twelve negroes carried 
away. Darliston trash-house was burnt; Catadupa, 
Lapland, and Mocha were burnt and two negroes 
carried away. There is a little block-house of stone 
on Lapland with loopholes in the walls, a most 
substantial place, but the roof has not been on in 
the memory of anyone living, and I wondered very 
much whether this was the Lapland that was burnt 
by the Maroons ; and we passed by Mocha, connected 
by an aerial rope railway on which were slung cars 
that descended with bananas to the country below. 
All these steep hillsides are flourishing fields of 
bananas now. Catadupa is lovely as its name, and 
there are one or two cottages there in which winter 
visitors may stay, revelling in a climate where the 
days are delightful, the nights gorgeous, and the 
mornings and evenings divine. 

Those freebooters did well. Not a man of them 
is known to have suffered. No wonder the colony 



A WRONG TURNING 207 

was roused to a simmer of excitement. I wonder — 
as probably some of the colonists wondered — why 
the slaves did not rise in a body, join these men 
of their own colour and make a bold bid for freedom. 

General Walpole was put in command, and he 
began entirely different tactics. He taught his men 
to take cover as the Maroons did, so that there 
are accounts of actions in which a great deal of 
powder was expended and no man was killed on 
either side, and he began to clear the country round 
the mountains, but as for trying to keep the Maroons 
penned in he knew better. "It would have been 
just as feasible as to pen pigeons in a meadow." 
He employed working negroes under cover of strong 
advanced parties to clear the heights that surrounded 
his camp, the approaches to the Maroon defile, and 
an eminence near to his headquarters, which almost 
looked into a cockpit. And always he kept the 
soldiers on the move, harrying the Maroons success- 
fully on the whole, but once a sergeant and ten men 
took a wrong turning, a thing easy enough to do 
in the mountains, and got into the Maroon defile, 
and presently the men who were waiting for that 
sergeant to bring them some more ammunition heard 
heavy firing, and not one man returned to tell 
the tale. 

And the soldiers kept clearing the country, and 
the Maroons kept breaking out in unexpected places, 
and raiding "like wild creatures of the forest, they 
found issues at every point." 

Still General Walpole had high hopes. The dry 
season would come with the winter months, and 
where he knew there was a spring he could get at, 
he mounted a howitzer and threw shells into the 
cockpit just beyond it. And some of the springs 
go dry in the dry season, and it was not likely the 



208 THE MAROONS 

Maroons were thrifty and conserved water. Though 
the rains in the mountains are plenteous in their 
season, I have myself seen the people come miles 
from that cockpit country with kerosene tins upon 
their heads to get water from the nearest spring 
which happened to be upon the Hyde. 

They did object to General Walpole. "Dam 
dat little buckra," said the Maroons, "he cunning 
more dan dem toder. Dis here da new fashion for 
fight. Him fire him big ball a'ter we an' wen de 
big ball top de dam sunting fire we agen. Come 
boys, make we go take farer an' see wha he 
do den ? " 

And they did go farther and were driven out 
again. But the soldiers had to be fed, and one day 
the Maroons surprised a convoy of provisions, 
captured the ten soldiers guarding it, and cut off 
their heads, and always they raided the negro 
provision grounds whether the slave owners liked 
it or not, and kept themselves well supplied. The 
soldiers were doing better, but the Maroons were 
still a thorn in their side, and the war threatened 
to be long and prolonged, which was bad for the 
prestige of the white people if nothing else. For 
nearly five months this body of untrained negroes 
had defied the military force of the island. 

The Governor called a council at Falmouth, a 
town on the north coast, twenty miles from Montego 
Bay — a very despondent council — and it was actually 
proposed, to the wrath of General Walpole, to send 
into the woods some of the Maroon chiefs confined 
at Montego Bay, men who had been confined in 
irons, as ambassadors to persuade the rebels to 
make peace ! 

Falmouth is not a town that attracts me, though it 
has a fine situation right at the sea-shore just beyond 



THE MAGNIFICENT COURTHOUSE 209 

the mouth of the Martha Brae, and it is reminiscent 
of the days of long ago. The houses without 
verandahs, without even a creeper over their bare 
white walls, in streets without the vestige of a tree, 
look hot with the tropical sun pouring down upon 
them, but it was an important place in those times, 
for it has a harbour into which quite big ships may 
come, and those houses to which I objected are all 
mahogany floored with mahogany and mahoe panell- 
ing against the walls, truly the houses of rich people. 
In the courthouse, where probably they held this 
meeting, for it is one of the largest houses in the 
town, the mahogany flooring is simply magnificent, 
and kept with a shining polish that could not well 
be excelled in any great house in London or New 
York, while from the ceiling hang most splendid 
chandeliers of cut glass. They hold balls in that 
room occasionally, and then they light those 
chandeliers, and all the thousand and one facets of 
the cut glass reflect the light back on to the dark, 
highly polished flooring, and the deep dark flooring 
reflects it back again, and the girls of Trelawny 
and St James have as magnificent a setting for their 
youth and beauty in this remote corner of the 
Empire as ever have girls in London Town. And 
here, more than a hundred years ago, the Governor 
of the colony and all the important men met to 
decide what they should do with a party of banditti 
who only eighteen miles away were setting the 
whole island at defiance. 

Disaffected, unconquered, they formed a rallying 
point for every discontented slave in the island. 
There lay the danger, the danger that was with them 
always. 

But no one had any proposition to make till a 
certain Mr Quarrell, who had a plantation near to 



210 THE MAROONS 

Bluefields, suggested that they should bring dogs, 
the hunting dogs the Spaniards kept to run down 
their slaves, from Cuba. 

Curiously enough, a people who seem to have 
hesitated at no barbarity where their slaves were 
concerned, hesitated over this matter. What would 
the rest of the world think of them if they hunted 
men with dogs ? However, necessity knows no law, 
and finally it was agreed to send Mr Quarrell to 
Cuba to get the dogs, and the men who could manage 
them. 

The tale of the bringing of those dogs reads like 
an epic in itself. Mr Quarrell embarked in the 
schooner Mercury, carrying twelve guns, and the 
crew of the Mercury consisted of four British sea- 
men, one of whom was made captain, twelve Curacoa 
negroes, and eighteen Spanish renegadoes, and they 
appear to have been as nice a parcel of blackguards 
as a man might well gather together in those times. 
Throughout the voyage, the English who were on 
board found it necessary to keep possession of the 
cabin and quarter-deck, and to keep all the arms 
under their own charge. It was a long story of 
tribulation, but finally after infinite difficulties, 
Quarrell shipped forty chasseurs and one hundred 
and four dogs. They were big dogs, like powerful 
greyhounds, and I suspect were something like the 
kangaroo dogs that were so common in Australia 
when I was a child, greyhounds crossed with some 
other breed to give them bulk and strength. The 
chasseur was armed only with a machete, and the 
dogs were not supposed to tear the man they came 
up with, but if he made no resistance to hold him 
and bark for assistance. It would be no good 
resisting man and dog, for the steel of the machetes 
was excellent, and they were about eighteen inches 



THE MERCURY 211 

long, formidable weapons. Dallas says these dogs 
and their keepers were employed in Cuba for taking 
runaways and breaking up bodies of negroes collected 
for hostile purposes, which is " sometimes occasioned," 
he remarks quaintly, "by the rigour exercised on 
the Spanish plantations." 

The Mercury was a luckless ship. She ran 
ashore on a sandbank and appeared likely to leave 
her bones there. They had shipped cattle to feed 
the dogs, and on that dark night the dogs broke 
loose and seized the cattle, and the bellowing of the 
cattle, the howling of the dogs, the wild wail of the 
wind, the roaring of the waves as they washed over 
the little ship, all combined to make pandemonium, 
and Quarrell must have felt the Maroons' luck was 
holding. Even when they got her off and arrived 
at Montego Bay their ill-luck pursued them, for 
from the little fort on the hillside that was a haven 
of refuge to the townspeople there came a volley of 
grape-shot, the officer in command having mistaken 
the Mercury for an enemy's privateer ! Luckily, 
they don't appear to have been good marksmen for 
no one was hurt, and the little ship came to anchor 
with some American ships between her and the guns. 

Amidst immense excitement the dogs and their 
guardians were landed. We can imagine it. How 
the news flew from house to house, the Maroons were 
to be hunted with these immense dogs with which 
the Spaniards never failed to bring down their 
slaves. And the house slaves listened round-eyed 
and passed on the news to the field labourers and 
the streets of the towu — those shamefully shadeless 
streets were thronged with people half-fearing, half- 
comforted with the reflection that soon the hills 
above the town would no longer be occupied by 
the savage Maroons. And, indeed, one hundred and 



212 THE MAROONS 

four great clogs, even though muzzled and held by 
great rattling chains, ferociously making at every 
strange object and dragging the chasseurs after 
them, must have made a formidable array. Every 
door in the town was barred and the people crowded 
to the windows, out of reach of the dogs who were 
to be their salvation. And they were hurried up the 
mountains, paraded before the General and — never 
used. 

But it was time they came. The dry weather 
was now come, the canes were very inflammable, it 
was difficult to defend some of the estates, especially 
those in the beautiful and fertile Nassau Valley, down 
which wanders the Black River, and it was reported 
that a large body of slaves were preparing to join 
the victorious Maroons. And then up that moun- 
tain path, the very same I dare say by which I 
went that December day, came the chasseurs with 
the dogs tugging at their waists, and the General 
held a review, a review at which the dogs grew so 
excited at the discharge of the guns that they flew 
at the stocks of the fusils which had been given to 
the chasseurs and tore them to pieces. The General 
himself had to flee before their onrush to his chaise, 
and it was only with difficulty they were restrained 
from tearing to pieces his horses. After which we 
are a little surprised to hear he expressed himself 
exceedingly pleased with the review. Perhaps it 
marks the desperateness of the situation. 

And what the white men knew in the morning 
before nightfall had been carried into the mountains 
and the Maroons probably discussed this new evil 
that had befallen them. There could be but one end 
if the white men came against them with dogs — but 
one end. And doubtless General Walpole and his 
officers judged from the effect it had on the negroes 



COMPROMISE 213 

the consternation that was inspired in the mountains, 
and they agreed that now the simplest thing would 
be to make peace as Colonel Guthrie had done fifty- 
six years before. In the end the whites must win, 
but the blacks might set the country in a blaze and 
do many thousands of pounds worth of damage 
before they were all taken. Therefore they would 
compromise. 

On the 14th December the dogs were landed at 
Montego Bay, and on the 18th Colonel Hull fell 
in with a party of Maroons under Johnson, and 
Johnson was their best leader. It was difficult to 
get into conversation with them, but the troops 
ceased firing and then the Maroon officers, who had 
some inkling of the offer that was to be made, 
were seen skipping about from rock to rock and 
Mr Werge of the 17th Light Dragoons, who seems 
to have been a very capable young man, with a cool, 
deliberate courage flung down his arms and stepping 
down the hill till he was close under them, called 
out that it was peace and they had better come 
down and shake hands upon it. Then Fowler the 
Maroon advanced aDd took him by the hand, and at 
Mr Werge's suggestion — he was as brave a young 
man as Dr Russell — they exchanged hats and jackets. 

Relations once established, General Walpole came 
up and the Maroons agreed that, on their knees they 
would beg His Majesty's pardon, that they would go 
to the Old Town or Montego Bay or anywhere else 
the Governor might appoint, and would settle on 
whatever lands might be given them. They would 
give up all runaways. And General Walpole agreed 
to a secret clause that they should not be sent off the 
island. 

And, indeed, the Maroons were in a bad way. 
They were short of provisions and measles had 

p 



214 THE MAROONS 

broken out among them, and their women and 
children were almost famished. 

The 1st of January 1796 was fixed for the day 
they should come in. But they were very dis- 
trustful. It was difficult to make them understand 
that no harm would be done them. Some few 
turned up, but practically the New Year's Day 
passed unnoticed. They straggled in by slow 
degrees, finding it exceedingly difficult to persuade 
themselves to abandon their mountain fastnesses for 
the tender mercies of the white man, but as a matter 
of fact all with the exception of the small parties out 
with Palmer and Parkinson came in within a fort- 
night of the day appointed, and the last were only 
out three months. 

But the Assembly because of this laxness, felt 
they might break their pledged word, and they 
banished the majority of the Maroons with incredible 
foolishness, considering that the negro line is supposed 
to be drawn at the 40th parallel of latitude, to Nova 
Scotia. Perhaps they hoped to destroy them, root 
and branch. There, as was only to be expected, 
they did not do well, and finally they were taken 
to Sierra Leone, where I read they made valuable 
settlers and helped the colony greatly. I was glad 
they did. And then I remembered that in Free 
Town I had met the most bumptious, the most 
aggressive, the most unpleasant black men it has 
ever, except in Liberia, been my lot to come across, 
and I felt my sympathies weaken. 

Jamaica was not unmindful of these her children 
whom she hated. For a small island she spent an 
enormous sum of money on their welfare. £46,000 
was expended in trying to colonise them comfortably, 
and this was supplemented by the British Government. 

General Walpole was bitterly angry. He had 



BANISHED 215 

given his word, and the country had broken it, and 
in his turn he declined to accept the sword of honour 
which the Assembly voted him in honour of his 
bloodless victory, and declined it in such terms that 
the Assembly considered the letter a misrepresenta- 
tion of their proceedings and ordered it to be 
expunged from their minutes. 

Not all of the Maroons were banished. Those 
who came in by the 1st of January 1796 were 
allowed to stay if they so pleased, and they settled 
about their old town and about Accompong, but 
their teeth were drawn. They were no greater 
danger now than any of the other black people. 
Less, in fact, for they had a certain contempt for 
the slaves, and regarded themselves as on a par 
with the white men. 

The people about Maroon Town now do not 
think of themselves as Maroons. The day I went 
up, when we had gone as far as we could within 
a mile and a half of the old Maroon Town, the 
people came crowding round, and they looked much 
like the dark folks who lived lower down in the 
mountains. One yellow man brought me a can full 
of green coffee berries. 

"No, not for sale, for the lady to remember 
we's by." I accepted the gift, so graciously given, 
and I asked the giver's name. 

"Reed," said he, and I said I'd put him in a 
book, but I don't believe he understood what I said. 
I felt in my pocket. I know of old the African likes 
a return present, but I had forgotten my purse, and 
my host settled the difficulty. 

" Take him round to the Chinaman's shop," he said 
to his driver, " and give him a drink," and my yellow 
friend, whom I thought must be grandson to one of 
those long-dead soldiers, accepted the offer with a smile. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

It is very difficult to understand the attitude towards 
trivial offences of people who lived in a time when 
the death penalty was legally inflicted for breaking 
down the banks of a fish pond, stealing anything 
over the value of a shilling from the person, or 
illegally felling trees. 

With the last clause I have some sympathy. 
I sometimes feel I could cheerfully see the death 
penalty inflicted upon whoever was responsible for 
making Jamaican towns bare of trees, for decreeing 
that telephone and telegraph wires are of more \ 
importance than shade, and for clearing all the 
country roads so that a tropical sun makes them 
a purgatory for the unfortunate traveller, when Nature 
herself has arranged so much more wisely. 

But that is somehow in another dimension, and 
I quite realise when white people were so hard 
on each other as they were a hundred years ago, we 
could not expect much consideration from them for 
the men they held in bondage. 

The first negroes were brought to serve and for !: 
nothing else. There was some faint talk of making 
them Christians and saving their souls, but I am ji 
afraid it was of their untilled cane-pieces the planters j} 
were thinking when they crowded down to the 
reeking slave ships. They who believed, if they 

216 



MATTHEW LEWIS A MAN OF TO-DAY 217 

gave the matter a thought, that any being who died 

unbaptized went out into outer darkness for eternity— - 

:| only neither they nor we can grasp eternity — gave 

j no welcome to the men who presently came to teach 

| their slaves. They objected. Well, even in this 

year of our Lord 1922, I have actually, yes actually 

heard a woman, who certainly should have known 

better, declare: "You know, my dear, this teaching 

of the lower classes is really a great mistake. It 

lifts them out of their own class." 

In all the mass of literature I have waded through 
about Jamaica I have met no one till I arrived at 
Matthew Lewis, writing of 1816, who looked at the 
negro with what we may call modern eyes. The 
Abolitionists patronised ; they had an object in view, 
a great object, truly, but it was the cause for which 
they fought. Lewis was much more reasonable and 
sensible. We can read him as we might read a 
man of to-day, on the conditions around him. He 
saw Jamaica as I and people like me see it, and 
weighed both sides and held the balance true, for 
he is far less hampered by tradition than we might 
expect. 

He landed at Savanna-la-Mar, which lies right 
upon the sea-shore, a sea-shore on which there is 
no cliff, and where the boundaries of land and water 
are by no means clearly defined. "A wild tropical 
storm swept over it while I was there, and I thought 
of Matthew Lewis as the rain came slanting down 
the wide street, turning the scene into one dreary 
grey whole ; sky, sea, land, we could hardly have 
told one from the other but for the houses that 
loomed up, grey blotches on the universal greyness. 
There were no trees, barely a sign of the riotous 
tropical vegetation, though presently the sun would 
be out in all his pride, and the whole town would 



218 THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

be craving for a little shade. But like many English 
colonists, the people of Savanna-la-Mar have decided 
that beauty, the beauty of trees and growing things, 
is not necessary in their town. If you want shade, 
what about corrugated iron ? 

I don't know what Savanna-la-Mar was like 
when Matthew Lewis landed there, but it was 
celebrating its holidays, the New Year of 1816, when 
the great gentleman arrived. 

"Soon after nine o'clock we reached Savanna- 
la-Mar, where I found my trustee and a whole 
cavalcade awaiting to conduct me to my estate. He 
had brought with him a curricle and a pair for 
myself, a gig for my servant, two black boys upon 
mules, and a cart with eight oxen to convey my 
baggage." 

It took a good deal to move a gentleman with 
dignity a hundred years ago. Nowadays it would 
have been: "We'll send the car for you, and your 
heavier baggage can come on by mule cart. You 
won't want it for a day or two, will you 1 " 

And here he gives us the sort of picture to 
which we have become accustomed in reading about 
the good old times of slavery. 

" Whether the pleasure of the negroes was sincere 
may be doubted"' — a wise man and a human was 
Matthew Lewis. He really does not see any reason 
why the slaves should be fond of him or make a 
fuss over him, " but certainly it " — the welcome — " was 
the loudest that ever I witnessed; they all talked 
together, sang, danced, shouted, and in the violence 
of their gesticulations tumbled over each other and 
rolled on the ground. Twenty voices at once en- 
quired after uncles and aunts and grandfathers and 
great-grandmothers of mine who had been buried 
long before I was in existence, and whom I verily 



« ME— YOUR SLAVE M 219 

believe most of them only knew by tradition. One 
woman held up her little black child to me, grinning 
from ear to ear. 

" Look, massa, look here ! Him nice lilly neger 
for massa." Another complained — 

" So long since none come see we, massa. Good 
massa, come at last." 

He rather liked it though. 

"All this may be palaver, but certainly they at 
least play their parts with such an air of truth and 
warmth and enthusiasm, that after the cold-hearted 
and repulsive manners of England this contrast is 
infinitely agreeable." 

He went to a lodging-house first, and there he was 
met by a remarkably clean-looking negro lad with 
water and a towel. Lewis took it for granted that 
he belonged to the house. The lad waited some 
time and at last he said : 

"Massa not know me ; me your slave." 

And here for the first time we find someone who 
feels uncomfortable at holding another in bondage. 

" The sound made me feel a pang at the heart," 
he writes. And not because the boy was sad. 
Stirring within the poet was some feeling concerning 
the rights of man. 

" The lad appeared all gaiety and good humour, 
and his whole countenance expressed anxiety to 
recommend himself to my notice ; but the word 
1 slave ' seemed to imply that although he did feel 
pleasure then in serving me, if he had detested me 
he must have served me still. I really felt quite 
humiliated at the moment, and was tempted to tell 
him. 

"Do not say that again; say that you are my 
negro, but do not call yourself my slave." 

And then again, when he was established in the 



220 THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

house, which he has left it on record was frightful 
to look at but very clean and comfortable inside, he 
remarks : 

"This morning a little brown girl made her 
appearance with an orange bough to flap away the 
flies." 

It had been impressed upon him that he courted 
death if he drank orangeade, if he walked in the 
morning after ten or went out in the cool of the 
evening, "be exposed to the dews after sundown" 
they put it. But he dares to write : " The air too 
was delicious, the fragrance of the sweetwood and 
other scented trees, but above all of the delicious 
logwood of which most of the fences in Westmore- 
land are made, composed an atmosphere such that 
if Satan after promising them a buxom air embalmed 
with odours, had transported Sin and Death thither 
the charming people must acknowledge their papa's 
promise fulfilled." It reads quaintly now. Sin — 
sin is so much a matter of the standard we set up. 
If the slave had copied the planter, no master 
would have considered him anything but a very 
sinful slave ; and death — death is often very, very 
kindly. 

Lewis enquires into the condition of the people. 
His attorney had written to him regularly of the 
care he expended on the negroes, but he had been 
away much of his time managing other estates, and 
had delegated his authority to an overseer who 
treated the people so harshly that at last they left 
the estate in a body and threw themselves on the 
protection of the magistrate at Savanna-la-Mar, 
"and if I had not come myself to Jamaica, in all 
probability I should never have had the most 
distant idea how abominably the poor creatures had 
been ill-used." 



A DISTINCT ADVANCE 221 

Now this marks a distinct advance since the times 
when the savages, speaking a jargon no one cared to 
understand, were driven to work with a whip. 

Lewis, to the intense surprise of his compeers, 
objected to the use of the whip. 

"I am, indeed, assured by everyone about me, 
that to manage a West Indian estate without the 
occasional use of a cart whip, however rarely, is 
impossible ; and they insist upon it that it is absurd 
in me to call my slaves ill-treated, because when 
they act grossly wrong they are treated like English 
soldiers and sailors. All this may be very true ; but 
there is something to me so shocking in the idea of 
this execrable cart whip that I have positively for- 
bidden the use of it on Cornwall ; and if the estate 
must go to rack and ruin without it, to rack and 
ruin the estate must go." 

But, of course, all men were not as broad- 
minded as Lewis. Bridges, who wrote twelve years 
later, could never mention a negro without adding 
some disparaging adjective, "the vigilance which 
African perfidy requires." "Experience proves that 
a strange uniformity of barbarism pervades them all ; 
and that the only difference lies in the degrees of 
the same base qualities which mark the negro race 
throughout." "The salutary measures were of little 
avail in winning over by indulgence, or restraining 
by terror the impracticable savages of Africa." Such 
are a few of the gems dispersed through his work. 
He could see no good in a black man, except that 
his thews and sinews were necessary to the develop- 
ment of the country, and he grudged them even that 
measure of praise. 

In the ten years between 1752 and 1762, 71,115 
negroes arrived in the island, "forced upon Jamaica 
by British merchants and English laws," says he, 



222 THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

though when England wanted to stop this inflow 
and to prohibit the slave trade, the Jamaican planters 
objected very strongly. They wanted these unwilling 
colonists. But since the majority of them were men, 
young, strong and lusty, and the Europeans were but 
a handful, it was necessary they should be ruled with 
a rod of iron. Bridges probably was right when he 
says that any relaxation was promptly attributed to 
fear. They had to be governed by fear and the 
people who are governed by fear, are crushed, 
broken, destroyed. How thoroughly destroyed we 
may see by reading statistics of the increase among 
the slaves, once the importation from Africa had 
ceased. 

This whip that Lewis abolished was used on all 
occasions. A man was beaten because he did not 
work, and women were beaten till the blood flowed, 
because they suckled their babies during working 
hours, which extended, be it remembered, from five 
in the morning till seven at night — by law — with an 
interval of half an hour for breakfast and two hours 
for the mid-day meal. The women would protest 
that the little things were hungry and cried, but if 
the overseer or book-keeper were not kind that was 
no excuse. Presently there came a law that no slave 
was to receive more than thirty-nine lashes at once. 
It was time. They are said on occasion to have 
received more than 500. But there were ways of 
getting over the new law. There were men who 
kept within the letter and yet inflicted fiendish 
punishment. There is a story told of Barbadoes : 

Two officers, Major Fitch and Captain Cook, 
hearing terrible cries, broke open a door and there 
found a negro girl chained to the floor being flogged 
by her master. The brute got out of their avenging 
hands — I am glad to think there was some pity in 



THE STATUS OF A SLAVE 223 

that world — but he cried exultingly that he had 
only given her the thirty-nine lashes allowed by the 
law at one time, and that he had only inflicted this 
number three times since the beginning of the night, 
and that he intended to give her the fourth thirty- 
nine before morning. This was long before Lewis's 
time. It was told by Wilberforce, when pleading for 
the Abolition of the Slave Trade. 

There were tales enough, of course, of this 
description and the case against the planters — some 
of them — was pretty bad. A youth of nineteen was 
found wandering about the streets of Bridgetown, 
Barbadoes, by General Tottenham in the year 1780. 
"He was entirely naked, with an iron collar about 
his neck having five long projecting spikes. His 
body both before and behind was covered with 
wounds. His belly and thighs were almost cut 
to pieces with running ulcers all over them ; and 
a finger might have been laid in some of the weals. 
He could not sit down, because his hinder part was 
mortified and he could not lie down on account of 
the prongs of his collar. He supplicated the General 
for relief, for his master had said as he could not 
work neither should he eat." 

And the people of Bridgetown did not rise up 
and slay that inhuman monster ! It took a long 
while for the West Indian planter to understand 
that a slave had any rights. 

Clarkson tells a tale of a master who wantonly 
cut the mouth of a child of six months old almost 
from ear to ear. Times were changing, and he 
was brought to task for it. But the idea of calling 
masters to account was entirely novel. 

" Guilty," said the jury, " subject to the opinion 
of the Court if immoderate correction of a slave by 
his master be a crime indictable." 



224 THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

The Court decided it was indictable and fined 
him £1, 5s. ! 

And yet that judgment is a great advance upon 
the times when the negro, as Mr Francis said in 
Parliament, was without Government protection and 
subject to the mere caprice of men who were at once 
the parties, the judges, and the executioners. He 
instanced an overseer who, having thrown a negro 
into a copper of boiling cane -juice for a trifling 
offence, was punished merely by the loss of his 
place, and by being obliged to pay the value of the 
slave thus done to death. He told of another 
instance, a girl of fourteen who was dreadfully 
whipped for coming late to her work. She fell down 
motionless, and was then dragged along the ground 
by the legs to the hospital, where she died. The 
murderer, though tried, was acquitted by a jury of 
his peers, because it was impossible that a master 
could destroy his own property ! 

Here is a story told by Mr Pitt at the same time. 
A passer-by heard the piercing shrieks of a woman 
cominsf from an outhouse and determined to see 
what was going on. On looking in he saw a girl 
tied up to a beam by her wrists, she was entirely 
naked, and was swinging backwards and forwards 
while her owner was standing below her with a 
lighted torch in his hand, which he applied to all 
parts of her body ! 

On the other hand, Mr Edwards told a story 
to the Assembly of Jamaica, of how some risen 
slaves surrounded the house of their mistress, who 
was in bed with her newborn child beside her. 
Imagine the poor woman shrinking down amidst 
the pillows, and round the bed these black savages 
with wild bloodshot eyes and cruel, grasping hands. 
The very smell of their naked bodies, their rags 



DUMB BEASTS OF BURDEN 225 

stained with blood and rum, would strike terror to 
her heart. They deliberated in their jargon how 
they could best put her to death in torment. But 
in the end one of them decided to keep her for 
his mistress. The vile broken patois they spoke 
made so much intelligible to her, and then snatching 
the child from her protecting arms they killed it 
with an axe before the poor mother's eyes. 

We can sympathise with the man who felt that 
no torments were too great for savages such as these, 
and with others who were certain that a repetition 
of such atrocities must be guarded against at any 
cost. 

And so by a law passed in the West Indies in 
1722, "any Negro or other slave withdrawing himself 
from his master for the term of six months, or any 
slave who was absent and did not return within 
that time every such person should suffer death." 

And coming back, of course, he might suffer a 
good deal. So that the unfortunate slave was ever 
between the devil and the deep sea. But slowly 
as we read the records, we can see the status of first 
the coloured man, and then the black man improving. 
In the beginning these Africans who up till the 
Abolition of the Slave Trade could speak but little 
English, and always spoke to each other in their 
own tongues, were simply dumb beasts of burden, 
necessary for the improvement of the colony, even as 
a certain number of horses and cattle and other 
stock were necessary. Always they were treated as 
inferior beings, even when they were desperately 
feared. Gossipy Lady Nugent talks of them as 
one would an intelligent, rather lovable dog or 
horse, and spares a little pity for their hard lot. 

"The mill is turned by water," she writes about 
a visit to a sugar estate, "and the cane being put 



226 THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

in on one side, comes out in a moment on the other, 
quite like dry pith, so rapidly is all the juice 
expressed, passing between two cylinders turning 
round the contrary ways. You then see the juice 
running through a great gutter, which conveys 
it to the boiling house. There are always four 
negroes stuffing in the canes, while others are 
employed continually in bringing in great bundles 
of them. ... At each cauldron in the boiling 
house was a man with a large skimmer upon a long 
pole, constantly stirring the sugar and throwing it 
from one cauldron to another. The man at the last 
cauldron called out continually to those below 
attending the fire to throw on more trash, etc., for 
if the heat relaxes in the least, all the sugar in the 
cauldron is spoiled. ... I asked the overseer how 
often his people were relieved. He said every twelve 
hours ; but how dreadful to think of their standing 
twelve hours over a boiling cauldron, and doing the 
same thing." (A woman before her time was Lady 
Nugent.) " And he owned to me that sometimes they 
did fall asleep and get their poor fingers into the 
mill; and he showed me a hatchet that was always 
ready to sever the whole limb, as the only means 
of saving the poor sufferer's life. I would not have 
a sugar estate for the whole world ! " 

This perhaps explains why in the slave books 
the slaves seem to be so often lame in a hand, or 
with only one hand. And yet there was no 
possibility of refusing the work. They must do it. 

Lady Nugent pitied, Matthew Lewis tried to 
remedy, the evils. He was particularly kindly, and 
was hated by the planters as making dangerous 
innovations in the management of an estate, and 
allowing much more latitude than others were inclined 
to think wise. They probably said he had not to 



"BAD MANNERS" 227 

live in the island ; he would go back to England and 
allow them to reap what he had sown. But he 
certainly reaped for a time himself; his overseers 
could get no work done, and on one occasion 
after his arrival the women refused to carry away 
the trash, " one of the easiest tasks that could be 
set. In consequence the mill was obliged to be 
stopped ; and when the driver on that station insisted 
on their doing their duty, a little fierce young devil 
of a lass, Whaunica, flew at his throat and 
endeavoured to strangle him." 

And again we find him writing : " Another morn- 
ing with the mill stopped, no liquor in the boiling 
house, and no work done." The whole estate was 
suffering from a bad attack of what the negroes 
call "bad manners," that is ingratitude, for if ever 
a man tried to help them, Lewis did. 

"My agent declares," he goes on, "that they 
never conducted so ill before ; that they worked 
cheerfully and properly till my arrival, but now they 
think that I shall protect them against all punishment, 
and have made regularly ten hogsheads of sugar 
less than they did before my coming upon the 
estate." 

He appears to have been a man of means, and in 
that he was an exception. I am sure that nearly 
all the planters felt they needed" every penny their 
estates would produce, many were already deeply 
dipped, and few and far between were those who 
could afford to try experiments in the cause of right. 
But Lewis persevered, and I am glad to think that 
in the end he was no loser, his negroes worked, and 
his estates did pay. 

He actually on one occasion dismissed a book- 
keeper for having ill-treated a negro, and took the 
evidence of four negroes against the denial of the 



228 THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

accused — and this in a time when a negro's evidence 
was inadmissible ! 

" I immediately discharged the book-keeper, who 
contented himself with simply denying the blow 
having been given by him ; but I told him that I 
could not possibly allow his single unsupported 
denial to outweigh concordant witnesses to the 
assertation : and if he grounded his claim to being 
believed merely upon his having a white skin, on 
Cornwall estate at least that claim would not be 
admitted ; and that as the fact was clearly established 
nothing should induce me to retain him upon my 
property except his finding some means of appeasing 
the injured negro, and prevailing on him to intercede 
on his behalf." 

How dared he ! In Jamaica ! 

"This was a humiliation to which he could not 
bring himself to stoop ; and accordingly the man has 
left the estate. I was kept awake the greater part 
of the night by the songs and rejoicings of the 
negroes at their triumph over the offending book- 
keeper." And this man had only sluiced a slave 
with dirty water, called him a rascal, and knocked 
him down with a broom because he did not clear 
away some spilled water fast enough ! No wonder 
the planters felt this newcomer was attempting 
dangerous innovations. 

"It is extraordinary," writes Lady Nugent, more 
than ten years earlier, "to witness the immediate 
effect that the climate" (always the climate) "and 
habit of living in this country have upon the minds 
and manners of Europeans, particularly the lower 
orders. In the upper ranks they become indolent 
and inactive, regardless of everything but eating and 
drinking and indulging themselves, are almost entirely 
under the dominion of their mulatto favourites. In 



"SOME BLESSINGS OF CIVILISED SOCIETY" 229 

the lower orders they are the same, with the addition 
of conceit and tyranny, considering the negroes as 
creatures formed entirely to administer to their ease, 
and to be subject to their caprice, and I have found 
much difficulty to persuade those great people and 
superior beings, our white domestics, that the blacks 
are human beings or have souls. I allude more 
particularly to our German and our other upper 
men servants." 

I am afraid there were a good many people like 
Lady Nugent's German and other upper men servants. 

But Lewis himself had very clear ideas as to the 
sort of people he was trying to help. He knew you 
could not expect either saints or wise men from men 
brought up as they had been, though the life might 
occasionally evolve a philosopher. 

"To do the negroes justice," he writes, "it is a 
doubt whether they are the greatest thieves or liars, 
and the quantity of sugar which they purloin during 
the crop and dispose of at the Bay is enormous." 

And he tells another lovely story of how he was 
taken in and his kindness imposed upon. There 
was a black watchman, old and sick, to whom he 
regularly sent soup, and then he discovered that the 
old scamp had hired a girl, and had a child by her, 
and for this accommodation he paid £30 a year to 
a brown man in the mountains ! - 

" I hope this fact will convince the African 
reporter," he writes, "that it is possible for some 
'of these oppressed race of human beings,' 'of these 
our most unfortunate fellow - creatures,' to enjoy 
at least some of the blessings of civilised society. 
And I doubt whether even Mr Wilberforce himself, 
with all his benevolence, would not allow a negro to 
be quite rich enough, who can afford to pay £30 
a year for the hire of a kept mistress." 

Q 



230 THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

A nice humour of his own has Lewis. He comes 
down to us pleasantly through the years. He gives 
us many little illuminating stories about the slaves 
and their ways. Already there were growing up 
among them many little differences. For instance, 
a pure bred negro might not aspire to the hand of 
a lady with some of the blood of the ruling class 
in her veins. One day he asked Cubina, his body- 
servant, the nice boy whom he had first met on his 
arrival, why he did not marry Mary Wiggins, a most 
beautiful brown girl, and they can be beautiful. 

"Oh, massa," said Cubina, shocked, "him 
sambo ! " — that is, the child of a mulatto and a negro. 
But this did not always hold good. 

He tells another story of a slave of his named 
Nicholas, a mulatto. Nicholas was the son of a 
white man, who on his deathbed charged his nephew 
and heir to purchase the freedom of this natural 
child. The nephew promised, and Matthew Lewis 
the master had agreed. Nothing was wanting 
except to find a substitute. But a substitute, once 
the slave trade had stopped, was very difficult to find. 
Before he was found, the nephew had broken his 
neck, and his estate had gone to a distant heir. 
Poor Nicholas's freedom was once more put off. 
Lewis says he liked the man so much he was 
strongly tempted to set him at liberty at once. 

"But," he adds very naturally, "if I began that 
way there would be no stopping," 

" Another," says Lewis, " was building a house 
for a superannuated wife — for they have so much 
decency to call their tender attachments by a con- 
jugal name." Which is merely to say that even 
the mulattoes continued African customs here in 
Jamaica. 

There was a law against slaves holding stock of 



A JAMAICAN SLAVE— AN ENGLISH LABOURER 231 

any sort, and of course at first they did not, but 
gradually men who had to go out into the wilder 
parts of the mountains to grow their provisions, 
acquired live stock as well, and they held it not only 
on Lewis's estate, but on other men's. Lewis bought 
all the cattle which the industrious ones bred, good, 
bad, and indifferent, at an all-round price of £15 a 
head, and he never charged them for pasturage. 
Truly patriarchal in his rule was he. He believed 
that the slaves, taken all in all, had a fairly good 
time, and he was a man of letters, a man who had 
travelled, and whose opinion is worth considering. 

"As far as I can judge," he writes in the inflated 
style of the time of George III. of blessed memory, 
"if I were now standing on the banks of Lethe 
with a goblet of the waters of oblivion in my hand 
and were asked whether I chose to enter life as an 
English labourer or a Jamaican negro, I should 
have no hesitation in preferring the latter." Doubt- 
less he was quite right. His saying it only proves 
to me what a ghastly time the English labourer 
must have had at the beginning of the last century. 

There is another aspect of slavery that we don't 
often realise, but he brings it before us clearly. At 
the present day if we wish to get rid of a bad 
servant, or even one we dislike, all we have to do 
is to pay him >and dismiss him, and we are quit 
of him and his evil ways ; but it wasn't so easy 
to get rid of a slave. He had a man named Adam, 
a Creole, who had a bad reputation as an Obeah man. 

" There is no doubt of his having infused poison 
into the water-jars through spite against the late 
superintendent. He is unfortunately clever and 
plausible, and I am told that the mischief that he 
has already done by working upon the folly and 
superstition of his fellows is incalculable. Yet I 



232 THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

cannot get rid of him. The law will not suffer 
any negro to be shipped off the island until he shall 
have been convicted of felony at the session. I 
cannot sell him, for nobody would buy him, nor 
even accept him if I would offer them so dangerous 
a present. If he were to go away the law would 
seize him and bring him back to me, and I should 
be obliged to pay heavily for his retaking and his 
maintenance in the workhouse. In short, I know 
not what to do with him." 

The habit of murdering the superintendents 
and "bushas'' who had done them an injury, some- 
times a very trivial injury, was one that had always 
to be taken into account, and a negro who had 
no personal grudge against the doomed man could 
always be relied upon to help a friend. Such were 
the strained relations between the white and black. 
A Mr Dunbar was set upon and murdered by his 
driver, helped by two young men who barely knew 
the planter by sight, and they could have had no 
possible grudge against him except that of colour. 
Again and again they had missed their chance by 
the merest accident, but one night as he was riding 
home from a dinner party at Montego Bay they 
rushed out from behind a clump of trees, pulled 
him down from his horse and clubbed him to death. 
No one suspected the driver, but a curious supersti- 
tion gave him away. Naturally, all the houses of 
the slaves were searched, and in the driver's 
Mr Dunbar's watch and one of his ears was found. 
The watch might have been arrived at by barter, 
but the ear had been kept by the murderer from 
a negro belief that so long as the murderer possesses 
one of the ears of his victim he will never be haunted 
by his spectre. 

It would be monotonous to put down the number 



"MAKE HER MASSA GOOD TO HER" 233 

of murders I have come across in my search for 
old tales of Jamaica. A book-keeper was discovered 
in one of the cane-pieces of Cornwall with his skull 
fractured, but the murderer was never discovered ; 
and innumerable were the book-keepers and over- 
seers who were poisoned by the women they trusted. 
Often the woman who mixed the draught had no 
idea of its being poison. She received the ingredients 
from the Obeah man as a charm to "make her 
massa good to her," by which, says Lewis, "the 
negroes mean the compelling a person to give another 
everything for which that other may ask him." 

It was always feud, feud, feud. Reading the 
slave books, we see how much of this bitterness 
must have been engendered. In crop time the 
slaves often had to labour all night, and frequently 
on Sundays they were in the cane-pieces instead 
of being allowed to go to their ground, and if 
they had not time to grow their provisions it is 
hardly likely these hard taskmasters made good 
the loss. 

"Great evil arises," writes someone in the Rose 
Hall estate book, possibly the Attorney in charge, 
"to the Negroes and stock from carting canes at 
night. An Overseer who arranges his work with 
judgment will always have abundance of canes in 
the mill yard by commencing to carry early in the 
morning. It is therefore my desire that no canes 
are to be brought from the field after Sunset." 

Judging by this book, sometimes the mills 
started after 7 p.m. on Sunday night and ran 
continuously till the following Saturday night or 
Sunday morning without intermission or rest for 
anyone, white or black. How bitter might be the 
black man thus worked remorselessly, even though 
the white man was himself driven by a higher power. 



234 THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

A study of the "Runaways" interspersed up 
and down the pages among the other entries shows 
us very clearly the position of the unfortunate slave, 
even though no word is said against him. Csesar 
on Rose Hall ran away again and again, and we 
feel great pity for Csesar because possibly he could 
not stand this appalling labour. He returned on 
the 6th July for the last time, and on the 21st 
of the same month among "Decrease of negroes" 
is a simple note "By Csesar died." Poor Csesar! 
What agonies did he suffer during that long, long 
fortnight. 

I went to Rose Hall once, a great four-storied 
stone building, approached by flights of steps built 
on arches. Its empty window-places, from which 
the glass has long since gone, look out over the 
blue Caribbean, its floors, where they are not worm- 
eaten, are of the most gorgeous polished mahogany, 
and the walls of the principal rooms are panelled 
with the like beautiful polished wood. It is empty, 
forlorn, the glory has departed, it is haunted, they 
say, and there is a blood stain that will not wash 
out on the floor. Of Mrs Palmer, who owned it 
last, very unsavoury tales are told. She is said 
to have murdered more than one husband and lived 
with her own slaves, doing away with her paramour 
when she tired of him. No old planter in the whole 
island had a worse reputation than this woman, 
who was murdered as late as 1833 by a lover 
who saw his influence waning. Rose Hall was 
a "bad estate." It was notorious for the ill- 
treatment of its slaves. Underneath the Great 
House, reached by a flight of stone steps, are rooms 
dark and airless, where the unfortunates who in 
any way transgressed were caged. The walls are 
of heavy stone, and the only means by which air 



STARVED IN A DUNGEON 235 

and light are admitted are by narrow slits in those 
walls, and they only give into another underground 
room. It was a ghastly and horrible place in which 
to confine anyone, let alone these children of the sun. 
I said this to a friend who told me of another estate 
on which a cruel master, when any slave offended 
him, had him shut up in a room — a dungeon he 
called it — which looked through iron bars on his 
dining-room. And there he kept the offender 
without food, and rejoiced he should be within 
sight and smell of the lavish plenty of the planter's 
table. Like a barbarian of old, the cruel master 
took pleasure in the thought of another's suffering. 
The narrator went on to say that on one occasion 
a slave was so shut up and the master went away 
taking with him the keys, and as no one could 
get in the unfortunate starved to death. This may 
be perfectly true, for it seems to me there is no 
particular form of torture to which the slaves have 
not been subjected at one time or another ; reading 
between the lines of the Eose Hall book, one of 
the latest slave books, you can see this. Never 
till I read up the annals of Jamaica did I so 
thoroughly realise the meaning of man's inhumanity 
to man, and I suppose the lot of the Jamaican 
slave was the lot of slaves all the world over. 
But we must remember too that there were certain 
compensations. 

As Lewis has shown, it was impossible in later 
times to get rid of an objectionable slave, and the 
slave when he was old and ill was by the kind 
master protected and cared for, and the women 
who had borne many children were exempt from 
all work. They were supposed to have no anxieties 
about the future, that should be their master's care. 
At its best, slavery supplied no stimulus to industry ; 



236 THE FOOTPRINTS OF THE YEARS 

at its worst — well, no words are bad enough for 
slavery at its worst. 

In the Worthy Park slave book there is frequent 
mention made of a slave always referred to as Creole 
Cuba's Cuffee, who seems to have been unmanage- 
able. At any rate he was always in trouble, and 
at last he was sent to Spring Gardens, where were 
others also difficult to deal with. It was not till I 
read in Lewis's book the evil reputation of an estate 
called Spring Gardens, about that time, that I knew 
how dreadful was their fate. Lewis quotes the 
owner as the cruellest proprietor that ever disgraced 
Jamaica. It was his practice when a negro was sick 
unto death, to order him to be carried to a distant 
gully among the mountains on his estate, there to 
be cast out and left to die, and the " John Crows " 
would clear away his bones. He also instructed the 
men who carried the unfortunate to the gully to 
strip him before they left him, telling them to be 
careful not only to bring back his frock, but the 
very board on which he had been carried. On 
one occasion a poor creature while being removed, 
screamed out that he was not dead yet, and 
implored them not to leave him to perish in the 
gully. His master cared nothing and ordered the 
funeral to proceed, but the bearers were less hard 
hearted and they brought the sick man back secretly 
to the negro village and nursed him till he recovered, 
when he was smuggled off the estate to Kingston. 
Apparently he found means to support himself there 
for one day, his late master on turning a corner came 
face to face with the man whose bones he thought 
had long ago been picked clean by the "John Crows." 
He immediately seized him and claimed him as his 
slave, and ordered the men who were with him to 
drag him to his house. But the slave made one 



THE IMPROVING POSITION 237 

more bid for freedom. He shrieked and cried out 
his woes, and I am glad to say that in Kingston the 
spirit of fair play held good. The crowd that 
gathered were so excited by the tale that Mr 
Bedward was glad to save himself from being torn 
to pieces, fled from Kingston, and never again dared 
to claim that slave risen from the dead. 

Lewis tells too of a man who was tried in 
Kingston for cruel treatment of a sambo woman 
slave. She had no friends to support her cause, 
nor any other evidence to prove her assertions than 
the apparent truth of her statement, and the marks 
of having been branded in five different places. Her 
master was actually sentenced to six months im- 
prisonment, and the slave was given her freedom 
as compensation for her sufferings. 

Thus we see slowly through the years the position 
of the slave improving. 



CHAPTER X 

THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

The feud that raged over the religious instruction 
of the negroes makes a curious piece of Jamaican 
history. 

"The imported Africans were wild, savage and 
barbarous in the extreme ; their untractable passions 
and ferocious temperament rendered severity neces- 
sary. They provoked the iron rule of harsh 
authority ; and the earliest laws, constructed to 
restrain their unexampled atrocities, were rigid 
and inclement. They exhibited, in fact, such 
depravity of nature and deformity of mind as gave 
colour to the prevailing belief in a natural inferiority 
of intellect ; so that the colonist conceived it to be 
a crime of no greater moral magnitude to kill a 
negro than to destroy a monkey ; however rare their 
interest in them, as valuable property, rendered such 
a lamentable test of conscience." 

Thus the Rev. George William Bridges on the 
negroes when their spiritual state was exercising 
the minds of all the religious teachers. This 
particular shepherd was wroth because he objected 
to the sectarians, that is Quakers, Methodists and 
Baptists, taking upon themselves any interest in the 
souls of the slaves. "The country already pays," he 
remarks, "near £40,000 per annum for their religious 
instruction." 

/ 28S 



OPEN TO A BARGAIN 239 

I don't know if I shall be called libellous, but 
it does seem to me that the Church was decidedly 
slack in dispensing that instruction for which she 
was so highly paid. She administered religion in 
the impersonal and dignified manner that was her 
wont, and the slaves might be christened if they so 
desired. Of course they had to get their master's 
consent, for it was not likely the parson was going 
to do it for nothing, and at the end of the eighteenth 
century it cost four bits a head, that is about 2s. 6d. 
But the clergyman was sometimes open to a bargain, 
and would do the whole estate for a fixed sum — 
about half the usual cost per head. And sometimes 
a whole estate would clamour to be christened. 
Sometimes they did it as a safeguard against some 
feared Obeah man, and sometimes simply to have 
names like the buckra. After their new name 
they added that of their master for a surname, 
and reserved the old name for common use. And 
then came trouble for the overseer or book-keeper, 
for the new Christians while exceedingly proud of 
being Christians like the buckras, were apt to 
forget their new names, and were always teasing 
to be told them, for, of course, they were recorded 
in the estate book. 

As late as the end of the eighteenth century no 
one bothered about the naming " of the slaves, and 
we find them entered in the Worthy Park estate 
book as Villian and Mutton, Baddo, Woman and 
Whore, but towards the end of the first quarter of 
the nineteenth, when Lewis writes, we find that even 
the Rose Hall slaves, and Rose Hall slaves were 
backward, had been christened, most of them. 

Hannibal, a Creole, that is a slave born in the 
island, aged 54, of good disposition, appears to 
have been content with his old slave name ; but 



240 THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

Ulysses, of the same age, and also a Creole of good | 
disposition, becomes Henry and adds Palmer because 
that was the name of his owner. Shemonth and 
Adonis, both Creoles of 42 and 39, make no change, 
perhaps the owner would not pay for their christen- 
ing, neither does Aaron, an African of 44, though 
how they knew the age of an African unless he had 
been bought as a baby I do not know. Out of 
fifty male negroes nearly half changed their names, 
but some who did not were children, so perhaps 
they were christened in the ordinary way. The 
names they chose seem to have been singularly 
commonplace. Why should Adam, aged 6, become 
William Bennett? Or Othello, who was older, 
J. Fletcher? Why should Eobert, a quadroon 3 
years old, become Lawrence Low, and why should 
Isaac, 12, become simple J. James ? 

Out of sixty women and girls only six of mature 
age neglected to change their names. None of the 
older women are married, but some of the younger 
ones add their married names. Still, matrimony was 
not much in favour, either with slave or free. Lady 
Nugent, twenty years before this book was entered 
up, is always worrying about it. 

" See Martin's daughter soon after breakfast. It 
is a sad thing to see this good, kind woman, in other 
respects so easy, on the subject of what a decent 
kind of woman in England would be ashamed of 
and shocked at. She told me of all her children 
by different fathers with the greatest sangfroid. 
The mother is quite looked up to at Port Royal, 
and yet her life has been most profligate as we should 
think at least in England." 

And so, I suppose, these slave women who were 
entered in the book about twenty years after Lady 
Nugent left the island, Cecelia and Amelia and Maph 



BAPTISM IN HIGH VOGUE 241 

and Cowslip, who was christened Mary Paton, and 
May who became Hannah Palmer, never bothered 
about matrimony. What made Sussanah Johnston 
become Elizabeth Palmer I wonder, and why did 
Kate become Annie Brindley, aDd why was Frankie, 
who was only 32, and valued at £90, neither 
christened nor married % I don't know that Sabina 
isn't a prettier name than Eliza, but a Creole negro 
slave of a hundred years ago evidently didn't agree 
with me. Eve aged 9 became Ellen, and to change a 
negro Venus to Eliza Stennet is bathos indeed. 

"Baptism," says Lewis, "was in high vogue, and 
whenever one of them told me a monstrous lie — 
and they told me whole dozens — he never failed to 
conclude his story by saying, ' Now, massa, you know 
I've been christened, and if you do not believe what 
I say I'm ready to buss the book to the truth of it.' 
I am assured that unless a negro has an interest in 
telling the truth, he always lies in order to keep his 
tongue in practice." 

The question Lewis did not ask himself was 
whether a white man in like circumstances would 
have behaved any better. 

It may be that the planters were — some of them 
■ — brutal men, but I know that had I lived in those 
times I should probably, like the planters, have 
regarded the ministers of the other denominations 
outside the Church of England as most offensively 
officious. The planters as was not unnatural re- 
garded their slaves as their property, property for 
which they had paid very heavily, and even though 
they allowed them many privileges they desired it 
to be clearly understood that these were privileges 
given of their own goodwill, and by no means 
to be considered as rights. The Baptists and 
Methodists preached what the planters considered 



242 THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

sedition. Even tolerant Lewis forbade the Methodists 
on Cornwall and Hordly, though he allowed any 
other denomination to preach to the slaves, and 
much as I dislike the Church of England parson 
Bridges, I dislike still more the Rev. H. Bleby. 
He and his confreres must have been a most 
pernicious lot. Evidently on their own showing 
they were not men of education. They took 
the Bible as their guide, quoting it in season and 
out of season. This is of course not a crime, but 
even nowadays it grates on the average man. 
In those days the insistence that the negro was a 
man and a brother when his master declared him 
a chattel was extremely offensive. 

Besides the doctrine of equality was considered 
dangerous. It was dangerous. 

In the beginning of the nineteenth century the 
talk of freedom was in the air. It was the burning 
question of the day in Jamaica. The planters dis- 
cussed it openly at their tables, so did the overseers 
and book-keepers, and the listening slaves waiting 
round the table carried all the gossip to the slave 
quarters, for then as now the black people went 
back to their quarters once the day's work was 
done. The tinder was more than dry when the 
spark fell. 

The former revolts in Jamaica had frankly been 
outbreaks of savages, dimly conscious of wrong, 
trying to regain their freedom, but the revolt of 
1831-32 was a revolt into which religion entered 
largely. The planters declared openly it was 
engineered by the Baptists, and the slaves them- 
selves called it the "Baptist War" and the "Black 
Family War," the Baptists being styled in slave 
parlance the "Black Family." 

Bleby discussing this last of the slave revolts 




[Face page 243. 



CONSTERNATION IN MONTEGO BAY 243 

which raged through Hanover, Westmoreland, St 
James and Trelawny, declares it started because a 
certain Mr Grignon, the Attorney of Salt Springs 
near Montego Bay, going out there one day close 
to Christmas met a woman with a piece of sugar- 
cane in her hand — not a very desperate offence one 
would think — and concluding it had been stolen 
from Salt Springs — it probably had — not only punished 
her on the spot but took her back to the plantation 
and called upon the head driver to strip and flog 
her. She happened to be this man's wife, so he 
refused, and the second driver was called upon and 
he too refused, and all the people taking their cue 
from their headmen defended her. The Attorney 
could not get that woman flogged, and becoming 
alarmed at the attitude of the people he called out 
the constabulary to arrest the offenders. But the 
whole body of the slaves menaced the constables, 
and the principal offenders made their escape to the 
woods. And the woods round Montego Bay, woods 
that clothe all the hills that the Maroons held so 
long, are particularly suited for such guerilla warfare. 
Kensington, a place high in the mountains, 
was the first place burned, and presently the night 
was lighted by properties burning in all directions. 
Down the steep hills from Kempshot, down through 
the dense jungle from Ketirement, from Montpelier 
and from Salt Springs, came the white people 
flocking to Montego Bay. We can understand the 
consternation that prevailed in the town. We can 
imagine the unbridled delight of the slaves as 
Great House after Great House was abandoned and 
went up in flames. Those flames spelled to them 
freedom, and they were sure that the whole island 
was given over to them. It was not. And in 
this revolt there was a peculiar character that we 



244 THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

find in no other. Many of the slaves were partly 
civilised now. It was twenty years since any had 
been imported from Africa ; many were acquiring 
a little property and had some small stake in the 
land, and must have felt the futility of the uprising. 
And on these the consequences of the revolt pressed 
heaviest. Which side were they to take % As 
plantation after plantation went up in flames, 
doubtless they were inclined to believe what the 
insurgent leaders told them, that the country — the 
country they loved, their country — had been abandoned 
by the white men. The position of the faithful 
slaves was difficult. 

Bleby says, and a certain Mr Beaumont, who 
certainly was not prejudiced in favour of the slaves, 
says that many of them were more afraid of the 
insurgents than they were of the free inhabitants, 
and many were carried off by the insurgents and 
forced to accompany them. 

But this did not save them once the whites 
got the upper hand. The planters put every slave 
in the same category and hanged ruthlessly, asking 
no questions, believing no assertions of innocence. 
They had been badly frightened, and they took 
vengeance like frightened men. 

About the revolt Bleby gives us more informa- 
tion than perhaps he intended. He is delightful — 
unconsciously. 

" Information reached the Commanding Officer," 
he says, "that it was the intention of the insurgents 
to attack and pillage the town ; and as the number 
of men was inadequate to the purpose, he required 
all who were capable of bearing arms to enrol them- 
selves for its defence " (it certainly seems to me 
a very natural desire on the part of the Commanding 
Officer), "myself, a Scotch missionary and a curate 



A VALUABLE RECRUIT 245 

included, the rector and another curate having 
already presented themselves as volunteers. I was 
far from yielding a cordial consent to this demand 
upon my services," how they must have loved 
him. " He gave promise that we should not be 
required to leave the town, and should only be 
called upon to act if the safety of the place should 
be menaced." 

And now, listen to the sufferings of this noble 
gentleman. One day they were asked to go a little 
way into the country and to return in the evening, 
but when they had been gone some distance he 
found they had no intention of returning for several 
days. I can see the Commanding Officer smiling 
secretly over the discomfiture of his valuable recruit. 
Incredible as it seems, considering the country was 
in the throes of a slave revolt, with all its possible 
horrors, this gentleman can actually write that they 
were "harassed by journeys day after day amongst 
the woods and mountains, often riding for eight 
or ten hours in succession beneath a scorching sun, 
and sleeping without pillow, sheet or mat, or any 
other accommodation on the boarded or earthen 
floor of the house where we might happen to stop 
for the night." 

Truly a very gallant gentleman ! I quite feel 
for the pleasure the Commanding Officer must have 
got out of making him as uncomfortable as he 
possibly could. Doubtless he would have joyfully 
put him in the forefront of the battle had there 
been a battle, but there wasn't one. 

After the first riotous outburst, when the whites 
were taken by surprise, there seems to have been 
no hope for the wretched slaves. 

The militia was composed naturally of planters, 
the officers being in many instances men whose 

R 



246 THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

property had been destroyed by the insurgents, and 
who regarded themselves as ruined or reduced to 
the verge of ruin by the revolted negroes. We 
cannot but agree with Bleby that these were the 
last men who should have tried them, but try them 
they did, and the reprisals were terrible. -As in 
the old days the Romans in Sicily, if I remember 
rightly, crucified their rebellious slaves along the 
sea-shore, so these Jamaican planters hanged and 
shot the deluded people without finding out whether 
they were guilty or not. After six weeks of trials, 
one of the newspapers at Montego Bay gravely 
announced : " The executions during the week have 
been considerably diminished, being in number only 
fourteen." 

They hanged them by twos and threes in the 
public market-place and left them hanging there 
till another lot were due, when they cut down 
the bodies and left them lying on the ground till 
the workhouse negroes came out with carts in the 
evening and took them away, to cast them into a pit 
dug for the purpose a little distance from the town. 

When the tropical day drew swiftly to its ending, 
and the sun sank gorgeous into the sea, when the 
purple and gold changed to bands of seasheli pink 
and delicate nile green, and the shadows swept up 
and the stars, gleaming crystals, came out in a sky 
of velvet, then for me those dead -and -gone slaves, 
trapped in a web of circumstance, rose from their 
graves and walked along the shore. Ignorant, toil- 
worn, insolent, cringing by turns, with all the vices 
of their unwilling servitude upon them, they cry to 
high heaven for vengeance. And avenged they 
have been, for surely Jamaica is the land of wasted 
opportunities. 

There is an old house high on the hills above 



"FOR GOD'S SAKE HAVE PITY!" 247 

Montego Bay. It is beautifully situated, looking 
away over the hills and over the lovely bay. It has 
two-foot thick stone walls built by slave labour, the 
pillars that uphold the verandah are of solid 
mahogany — painted white by some Goth' — and the 
windows are heavily shuttered. 

It is haunted, they say. 

" Knock, knock, knock ! " comes a sound against 
the shutters of one room every night, a passionately 
appealing knock that will not be stayed. Only some 
people can hear it, but when they do, it wrings their 
hearts, so importunate is it. One man I know of 
sitting there reading at night, used every prayer 
and exhortation he could think of to still that uneasy 
ghost — he was a priest of the Church of Eome — 
but it would not be stilled, and at last he — practical, 
middle-aged man as he was, fled away from the 
sound of it to some friends who lived the other 
side of the town, and refused ever to come back to 
that haunted house. Was it some unhappy woman 
begging and praying her master who had been her 
lover to intercede for her son caught in the slave 
revolt? Whoever it was prayed there, prayed in 
vain, and now sensitive souls hear the knock, knock, 
knock, "for God's sake have pity and help me ! " 

Oh, most of the houses of the old slave town 
could tell pitiful stories. 

Bleby tells ghastly ones of what happened to the 
unfortunate slaves when the whites had recovered 
themselves and got the upper hand. In reading 
them, we must always remember that this is always 
the case when a handful of people holding a very 
much larger class by fear has been thoroughly 
frightened itseif. 

There was a negro named Bailey who had hidden 
his master's silver for safety in a cave, and after the 



248 THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

rebellion was over he took one of the women belonging 
to the estate and went to the cave to bring back 
to the house the property which he had hidden. 
He sent off the woman with a load upon her head, 
and remained behind to get out the rest. A 
company of militia came upon him thus engaged. 
They paid no heed to his explanations, and when the 
woman returned for another load he had been 
hanged as a man taken red-handed ! 

But the case that Bleby dilates upon is that of 
a negro named Henry Williams. Now Henry 
Williams appears to have been a very decent, respect- 
able man, far advanced from the wild savage who was 
his progenitor. He was wickedly treated, but I do 
not think he was exactly the martyr Bleby makes out. 

"He was a respected and useful class leader in 
the Wesleyan Society at Beechamville," says Bleby. 
Can't we imagine him ? He was a driver when he 
wasn't in religion, a slave on Rural Retreat, and the 
adjoining estate belonged to our friend the Rev. 
George William Bridges. This was extremely unlucky 
for Henry, for evidently the attorney who managed 
Rural Retreat and Mr Bridges got talking together, 
and doubtless agreed on the unfortunately growing 
tendency of the slaves to think for themselves. More 
particularly did they object to this chapel - going, 
and the attorney of Rural Retreat instanced Henry as 
a particularly virulent specimen of the genus Black 
Baptist. They concocted a plan which holds them 
both up to contempt. The manager of Rural Retreat 
sent for Henry, and though he was not in the habit 
of going to any place of worship, told him that he 
was going to church at Mr Bridges' house and desired 
the attendance of all the slaves on Rural Retreat. 
None were to go to Bellemont chapel, which appears 
to have been the place they affected. But none 



CHAINS AND THE WHIP 249 

came to Mr Bridges' house save and except Henry. 
Even his wife and children had gone to Beliemont 
as usual. On his master asking him why he had 
not obeyed his order and brought the people to 
service, he answered meekly enough that the people 
were not under his direction on Sunday. 

"But have I not told you," said his master, "that 
you and the people are not to go to Beliemont chapel 
preaching and praying ? How dare you go when I 
tell you not and encourage the people to disobey 
my orders ? I'll teach you to disobey my orders. 
You shall not go to Beliemont for nothing ! " 

And he actually sent the unfortunate man to the 
Rodney Hall "Workhouse, the most dreaded work- 
house in the whole island — this man who was a class 
leader and a man of standing among his own people — 
with his hands tied behind his back and in charge of 
other slaves like a common criminal, though they knew 
perfectly well that he would have gone and delivered 
himself up to receive what was coming to him. 

"I have no mind," said his master, "that you 
should go there as a gentleman, as if you were going 
on your own business." 

" Excessive labour, miserable diet, chains and the 
whip, soon brought down his strength," writes Bleby, 
and he goes on to tell at length of his suffering. His 
leg was so diseased that he could- not put it to the 
ground, he had been thrashed till his back was one 
unspeakable sore, so pestiferous that the prisoners 
in the same cell complained that the stench pro- 
ceeding from his wounds was too great to be endured. 
At last he was released. And I suppose for want 
of any other place to go to, made his way back to 
his own people. 

And his master made him the text of his dis- 
course to his slaves. 



250 THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

"Do you see that man," he said. "There is a 
man that wears as good a coat as I do, and can 
be trusted with anything about the property, but 

because he will go to that preaching place, you 

see what a tremendous punishment I have laid upon 
him • and if I will serve that man so, what won't I 
do to the rest of you if you disobey my orders and 
go to Bellemont chapel." 

Undoubtedly Williams could have induced the 
people on the estate to go to church, and undoubtedly 
he encouraged them to disobey their master. It 
shows a great step upwards in the status of the 
slave, and it shows us clearly the cruelty of slavery. 
Why should not a man worship where he pleased ? 
But it was for disobedience that Williams was 
punished. Bleby talks about him as we should of 
a saint and martyr. He may have been, but in the 
eyes of his master he was merely a very disobedient 
slave whom he had to break lest the disaffection 
spread. 

Bleby is an amusing person, though he does not 
intend it. He finds in the end that all those who 
had ill-treated the slaves suffered punishment at the 
hands of God. Most of them were cut off in their 
prime, by accident or suicide, all but Mr Bridges 
the rector, who had his deserts in a different 
manner. 

" One morning, having breakfasted on board a 
ship in the harbour with his four youthful and lovely 
daughters, who were but too fondly beloved, and 
several other ladies and gentlemen, the whole party 
went out for a short excursion in the ship's boats. 
While they were thus pleasurably engaged a squall 
arose, unobserved by the party in the boats, and 
swept suddenly across the bay ('beautiful Kingston 
Harbour ' ), when the boat containing the four 



THE COLONIAL CHURCH UNION 251 

young ladies and two or three other persons was 
capsized, and the sisters all disappeared, to be seen 
no more. The agony of the bereaved parent while 
he gazed from the other boat upon the spot where 
his children had been swallowed up in a moment, 
may be more easily conceived than described. He 
was stricken to the dust. The towering pride which 
was characteristic of the man gave way when he thus 
felt the hand of God upon him." 

It was men like Bleby who took the religious 
training of the slaves in hand. And they succeeded 
in gaining their confidence, not because they were 
the best people to have their minds and morals in 
charge, but for the very same reason that such 
Nonconformists succeeded in England. They saw 
how cruelly, heavily, the established rules pressed 
upon those in the lower social stratum, and they not 
only sympathised with them but promised repara- 
tion in another life. 

Feeling ran very high in Jamaica in those times. 
The Colonial Church Union was formed, and the 
members behaved in a manner that would have 
been unseemly in a collection of drunken pugilists, 
let alone people declaring themselves supporters of 
the Established Church of the realm. Up and down 
the land they waged war against the "sectarians," 
they visited the houses of these- preachers, and on 
more than one occasion tarred and feathered those 
they particularly disliked. On one occasion they 
even wreaked their wrath on Bleby himself. Now 
I do not think any man should be tarred and 
feathered, but if any man was going to be, I am 
really glad it was Bleby. There is something about 
his book which makes me — who would like to be 
an impartial historian — thoroughly dislike him. I can 
quite appreciate the effect he had upon his compeers. 



252 THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

The editor of the Courant, a paper which appears 
to have been published at Montego Bay, wrote : " The 
bills against the painters of parson B— have all 
been thrown out, and the chapel razers have not 
been recognised; so they are all a party of igno- 
ramuses ! I have only to say for myself, that if a 
mad dog was passing my way, I would have no 
hesitation in shooting him ; and if I found a furious 
animal on two legs teaching a parcel of poor ignorant 

beings to cut my or to fire my dwelling, my 

conscience would not trouble me one bit more for 
destroying him, than it would for the destruction 
of a mad dog." 

There we have the feelings of the two classes 
in a nut-shell, as quoted by that pestilential person 
Bleby himself. The planters were very sure that 
the dissenters by their teaching were inciting the 
negroes to rebellion, and having read Bleby care- 
fully, I can quite understand how the teaching of 
men like him undoubtedly widened the breach there 
must always have been between master and slave. 

Most dissenters I fancy came under suspicion. 
There was a young man called Whiteley, a relation 
of the absentee proprietor of an estate called New 
Ground, who had been sent out by his relation with 
letters to the manager, and a suggestion that he 
should be given work on the estate. But what 
he saw there he did not like. He spoke openly of 
his dislike and incurred the displeasure of the St 
Ann's Colonial Church Union, and they sent him a 

deputation of two of their number, stating : 

" 1st. That they had heard he had been leading 
the minds of the slaves astray by holding forth 
doctrines of a tendency to make them discontented 
with their present condition. 

2ndly. That he was a Methodist. 



TAR AND FEATHERS 253 

3rdly. That they had a barrel of tar down on 
the bay to tar and feather him, as he well deserved, 
and that they would do so by G ! " 

Now his offences appear very mild, and hardly 
deserve such drastic treatment, though I think the 
young man was a little smug. 

Here are the offences : — 

1st. He acknowledged he ha,d written a letter to 
the Rev. Thomas Pinnock, a Wesleyan missionary, 
asking him to help him in getting other employment 
away from the estate. Surely quite the proper thing 
to do, since he did not like the way the estate was 
conducted. 

2nclly. In a letter written to the attorney of New 
Ground, he had said, " The Lord reward you for the 
kindness you have shown me, and grant you in health 
and wealth long to live ! " 

I really can't see that that called for tar and 
feathers. 

3rdly. That he had said to a slave who had 
opened a gate for him at a certain place, "The 
Lord bless you ! " 

4thly. That he had asked the drivers of the 
workhouse gang questions respecting the offences 
of negroes of that gang. And surely that was 
harmless enough. 

5thly. That he had made private remarks about 
the manner in which he had seen Mr M'Lean the 
overseer treat the slaves. 

Here one of the deputation, Dicken, who was 
overseer at Windsor, a neighbouring estate, told 
him that he had two negroes at that moment in 
the stocks ; and added with a brutal oath, if he 
would come over in the morning he would let him 
see them properly flogged. 

I wonder how many unfortunates got an extra 



254 THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

flogging, not because they deserved it, but just to 
show those who were bent on helping the negro 
that the other side, who were pledged to slavery 
and things as they were, defied them and all their 
works. 

The last accusation the young man declared had 
not a particle of truth in it. He had never preached 
to 150 slaves at one time, though to all the other 
offences he pleaded guilty. 

It shows how high party spirit ran, how the 
planting class objected to raising the status of 
the slave, when we find that these planters managed 
to get that dangerous young man banished the 
island before he had been there fourteen weeks. 
He was sowing the seeds of disaffection in a soil 
already ripe. 

"These extracts," says Bleby, "show . . . the 
almost rabid hostility of the planters to everything, 
and to every person who had the most distant 
connection with the religious instruction of their 
slaves." 

Again and again the Colonial Church Union 
shut up the chapels, razed them to the ground, and 
drove out and often tarred and feathered the 
preachers. Their very lives according to Bleby 
were in danger. At last these doings attracted the 
attention of the Governor, the Earl of Mulgrave, 
afterwards the Marquess of Normanby, and he took 
the strong measure of dismissing from his regiment 
Colonel Hilton of St Ann's Western Regiment, not 
exactly for being a member and leading spirit in 
the Colonial Church Union, but because he, the 
colonel of a regiment of militia, had dared to put 
his name to resolutions censuring the conduct of 
the Captain- General — the Earl of Mulgrave — upon 
a most important point of military discipline. " He 



"YOUR COMMISSION IS CANCELLED" 255 

has no choice," wrote the Governor's secretary, "but 
to remove you from the command of the St Ann's 
Western Regiment; and I have therefore received 
his commands to notify you that your commission 
is accordingly cancelled." And the letter is addressed 
"James L. Hilton, Esq., St Ann's." 

We can imagine the slap in the face this must 
have been to the planters. The Governor himself, 
who should have upheld the ruling classes in every- 
thing, actually ranging himself with dissenters, 
dissenting parsons and slaves ! That is what James 
Hilton and men of his ilk doubtless said to each 
other over their rum punch, when a royal proclama- 
tion was issued declaring the Colonial Church Union 
to be an illegal association. But the Governor stuck 
to his point, a circular was addressed to the custodes, 
the chief magistrates of each parish, calling upon 
them to do their duty, and he expressed his deter- 
mination to deprive those who continued to adhere 
to the Union of all appointments they might hold 
under the Crown ; also declaring that neither actual 
violence towards missionaries, nor a repetition of 
illegal threats would be allowed to pass unpunished. 

But the Colonial Church Union had many friends. 
I can quite see those planters meeting and cursin^ 
the foolishness of the Governor, who actually inter- 
fered on behalf of these unspeakable dissenting 
parsons. They said he could not possibly under- 
stand in what manner the chapel preachers upset 
the negroes. The man who took the command of 
the St Ann's Regiment in place of Mr Hilton, a 
Mr Hamilton Brown, at the first muster declared 
in emphatic language he was in entire agreement 
with their late colonel. He was sure that not only 
the regiment, but everyone in the island whose opinion 
was worth having would be with him. 



256 THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

He reckoned without his host. 

"Lieut. -Col. Brown was on the ground at 
the head of his regiment," says Madden, writing 
of the Colonial Church Union — and Madden was 
one of the special magistrates sent out at the 
Abolition, a particularly fair and farseeing man, 
"when the Governor, Lord Mulgrave arrived. 
His Lordship addressed the regiment, and Lieut. -Col. 
Brown was ordered by him to sheath his sword 
and consider himself removed from the regiment. 
Upon his dismissal three-fourths of the regiment 
broke and quitted the ranks ; some of the officers 
tore off their epaulets and trampled on them ; the 
men were however re-collected in the ranks and 
marched past in review order under the command 
of the officer next in rank not, however, without 
every attempt, by persuasion and abuse alternately 
from the mutinous officers, to induce the men to 
refuse to perform their duty. A stone of large 
size was thrown at the Governor, which fortunately 
fell short of his person ; the officer, however, who 
was charged with this disgraceful outrage denied 
having committed it, and no further investigation 
took place. Thus ended the memorable review at 
Huntly Pastures." 

It was not only the officers of the St Ann's 
Regiment who were in agreement with the Colonial 
Church Union, for they say that actually eleven 
magistrates were dismissed before its power was 
broken. 

I suppose they held the last redoubt in the cause 
of slavery. And Jamaica must have been rather an 
exciting place to live in while that last defence was 
held. The slave-holders were all the more bitter 
that their power was slipping from them, and it 
was some little time before the dissenting ministers 



A BRAVE CUSTOS 257 

were allowed to preach as they wished and without 
interference. Some of the custodes had a hard time 
protecting them. Many of them asked for trouble. 

A Mr Greenwood applied at the Quarter Sessions 
of the Parish of St Ann to take the oaths. The 
custos was S. M. Barrett, and there was a big 
assembly in the Courthouse, a large number of 
persons being connected with the former Church 
Union. No sooner did Mr Greenwood make his 
appearance in the Court than there was a loud 
uproar. These angry gentlemen vented their wrath 
upon him. 

" Methodist parson among us ! " they shouted. 
" Turn him out ! Turn him out ! We will have 
no Methodists here ! " They were on their own 
ground. One magistrate shouted : " I protected 
one of the wretches before at the hazard of my 
life! I will not protect this one!" And Mr 
Hamilton Brown, his dismissal from his regiment 
still rankling, called upon the custos "to order 
Mr Greenwood out of the Courthouse forthwith ! 
Forthwith ! " 

But the custos was made of sterner stuff. 
Though without sympathy for the preacher, he 
declared he was going to administer the law without 
respect of persons. 

"So long as a doubt remained as to what law 
or laws were in force here affecting dissenters, 
I have allowed all the advantages of that uncertainty 
to popular prejudice ; but now that it has been 
shown and decided that the Toleration Act is in 
force in this island, I am bound, it is imperative 
on me, to admit Mr Greenwood to qualify and take 
the oaths." 

But his listeners would not believe him. 

They shouted, "It has never been decided." In 



258 THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS 

fact they didn't like the Methodists, and finally, each 
one feeling the support of his fellows, it came to 
" We set the law at defiance ! " 

At the hazard of his own life that custos defended 
the parson of whom he disapproved highly, and 
finally, getting open the door of the room of the 
grand jury, he advised the minister to escape through 
the window, for he could no longer defend him ! 

I like this story. It must have been such a 
stirring scene. It is told by Bleby to illustrate the 
brutality of the planters. We of another age can 
look on with a smile, as elders smile at and enjoy 
the fallings out of children. The riot was brought 
to the notice of the Governor, who promptly ordered 
an investigation, which led to a prosecution of Messrs 
Brown and Rose, two of the principal leaders, a 
prosecution and a triumph ; for the grand jury 
acquitted them I doubt not as planters who had 
upheld waning rights and were worthy of all the 
honour their fellows could give them. I expect 
they all thought things would be better in the 
future, and their sons would see their actions 
justified. 

But things were nearing the end. The long, long 
martyrdom of slavery was drawing to a close. In 
a few short months came Abolition, and the slave 
was free to worship when and where he chose. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

The freeing of the slaves came in the second quarter 
of the nineteenth century. Think of it, not ninety 
years ago ! And a short time before Matthew Lewis 
wrote — 

"The higher classes are in the utmost alarm at 
rumours of Wilberforce's intention to set the negroes 
entirely free ; the next step to which would be in 
all probability a general massacre of the whites, 
and a second edition of the horrors of St Domingo." 

It must have been with some misgivings then, 
that the great day dawned when the slaves were 
not exactly set free, but made apprentices for a short 
time to accustom them to this new-found freedom. 

And the apprenticeship seems to have been a 
ghastly failure. It took away from the slave the 
protection of the well-meaning master who could 
not afford to spend lavishly upon property, to whose 
services in a very short time he would have no right, 
and it left him entirely at the mercy of the man who 
had no conscience, and who simply set out to get 
as much as he could out of the slave while he was 
in his power. 

Even England was doubtful as to the effect of 
her step, and she sent out certain magistrates who 
were looked upon with suspicion by the planter, and 
only by definitely siding with the white man in all 



260 THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

disputes were they agreeable to the ruling classes. 
A Dr Madden is one of these, and his description of 
life in Jamaica is graphic, though when I read 
how he had to part with his little boy, whose life 
he dared not risk in so perilous a climate, and then 
of the long voyage to the other end of the earth, I 
see how far those ninety years have taken us. 

Lady Nugent, writing about a quarter of a century 
before, was great on the deadly climate of Jamaica. 
She goes to Moneymusk, which then belonged to a 
widow, with whom were staying two other ladies, 
also widows. "Alas," writes Lady Nugent, "how \ 
often in this country do we see these unfortunate 
beings." (Mrs Sympson of Moneymusk doesn't seem 
to have deserved this epithet. The estate was 
managed by her, and apparently well managed.) 
" Women rarely lose their health, but men as rarely 
kept theirs." She doesn't put two and two together, 
though she is always referring to poor Jamaica as 
"this horrid country," "this deceitful, dreadful 
climate." Certainly the number of deaths among 
those around her, presumably her friends, was a 
little appalling. But considering that she herself 
called attention to the way the people ate — and 
drank — I don't know why she should have blamed 
the climate. 

Things hadn't improved when Madden came on 
the scene nearly a generation later. The amount 
of drink a gentleman consumed at dinner was 
astonishing. 

"Half a bottle of Madera or so," he writes 
sarcastically, "can never do a man any harm in a 
hot climate, and sangaree and brandy and water are 
all necessary to keep up his strength, for people of 
all countries are the best judges of the mode of 
living in their own climate." 



COME TO SCOFF AND REMAINED TO PRAY 261 

This kindly magistrate took too much interest 
in the slave to have been quite acceptable to the 
planter of that day, who seems still to have regarded 
the negro as belonging to a lower order of creation 
and liked to feel that he — the negro — owed all benefits 
to the kindly indulgence of his master. 

He attended on one occasion a Baptist chapel 
in Kingston where the minister was a negro 
of the name of Kellick — " A pious, well-behaved, 
honest man, who in point of intelligence and the 
application of scriptural knowledge to the ordinary 
duties of his calling and the business of life, might 
stand a comparison with many more highly favoured, 
by the advantages of their education and standing in 
society. I was first induced to attend this man's 
chapel from motives of curiosity, not unmixed I fear 
with feelings of contempt for its black parson ; I 
confess after I had heard him for a short while 
expound the scriptures, and prescribe to his congrega- 
tion (all of whom were negroes like himself) on their 
duties as Christian subjects and members of society, 
and then his earnest and humble petition to the 
Almighty for a blessing on his little flock, and the 
hymn which closed the service, in which the con- 
gregation joined in one loud but very far indeed 
from discordant strain, I felt, if the pomp and 
circumstance of religious worship were wanting here 
to enlist the senses on the side of devotion, there 
were motives in this place, and an influence in the 
ministry of this man (however he might have been 
called to it, or by what forms fitted for its duties) 
which were calculated to induce the white man who 
came to scoff to remain to pray." 

This of a man who but quite recently must have 
risen from slavery. He received from the contribu- 
tions of his congregation about £100 a year, which 



262 THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

it was understood was for the upkeep of the chapel jj 
as well. Madden thought it very little, but Madden ! 
is a nice man with large ideas, and I feel sure the 
Rev. Kellick was not only quite satisfied with what 
he received, but intensely proud of the position he 
held. As indeed he had every right to be. He had 
come a long, long way by a very thorny path. 

Madden gives the usual account of the negroes. 
" Generally speaking, the negroes of the present day 
have all the vices of slaves. It cannot be denied that | 
they are addicted to lying, prone to dissimulation, 
and inclined to dishonesty. ..." Now what else I 
wonder did they expect of a slave. But he goes on 
to say that in the late rebellion — of 1831-32 — "In no 
instance did the negro swerve from his fidelity to 
his comrades ; in not a single instance was the name 
of the real author of that rebellion disclosed. I 
venture to intimate that even the rebellious negro 
has a sentiment of honour in his breast when he| 
encounters death rather than betray one of his! 
accomplices. I hazard an opinion that humanity 
has its impulses in his heart, when he shelters his | 
fugitive countryman, and shares his last morsel off 
bread with him rather than turn the outlaw from his i 
door, and save himself from the fearful consequences | 
of harbouring a runaway." \ 

It seems strange that ninety years ago it had to 
be explained to the civilised world that the negro | 
was like other men, capable of great heights and \ 
abominable depths. That a little more than a; 
hundred years ago, so great was the prejudice against i 
colour that a man whose grandmother had been a 
negress was not allowed to be a constable, could not 
inherit property beyond the value of £1200 sterling, I 
nor give evidence in criminal cases. 

"It was the fashion," writes Madden, "to regard 



COLOURED MASTER AND WHITE SERVANT 263 

him with jealousy and distrust, as a rebel in disguise, 
who was to be branded as such on all plausible 
occasions." 

But though the laws might prevent a coloured 
man from inheriting money, they did not prevent his 
making it, and when he himself became a slave owner 
a very curious state of affairs arose. The danger of 
slave risings was always present, and the coloured 
planters like the white had to have on their estates 
" deficiency men," white men, one for every ten slaves. 
But so strong was the feeling on the question 
of colour that these men whom their necessities 
compelled to take service with the sons or grandsons 
of slaves, declined to sit at meat with them. The 
owner had to have a side table set for himself, while 
his white servants sat at the principal one. 

And the coloured people came into existence so 
naturally. 

At first, as we have seen, many of the planters for 
very good reasons never brought their wives to their 
estates. Then again, overseers, book-keepers, and 
other employees could not afford to marry ; they came 
to the country, and there were many it was said 
at the beginning of the last century who might be 
in the country over a dozen years without ever 
speaking to a white woman. What more natural 
than that they should form alliances with the good- 
looking daughters of the slaves who were under them. 
Such connections were looked upon with approval by 
the owners and attorneys. A white man was always 
bothered to take a wife, at least so I gather from 
the perusal of old stories of Jamaica. 

"Why massa no take him one wife like oder 
buckras ? Dere is little Daphne would make him one 
good wife — dere is one Diana — dere is little Venus— 
dere is him Mary Magalene, an' dere is him Phoebe." 



264 THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

Sometimes it was the other way round and he 
couldn't get a wife, for if there was a prejudice against 
a man the word went forth in the slave quarters, and 
not a girl would look at him. 

Very naturally being Christians did not affect 
this relationship. No white man would really marry J 
a dark girl were she beautiful as the rising dawn. 
A white lover meant advancement in a coloured 
girl's world, and she in her turn often gained great 
influence over the man who had chosen her. Indeed i 
the majority of these women were faithful, tender c 
and loving. They were not always the wisest ofi 
housekeepers, I am afraid — how should they be — and ' 
the Great House so managed was apt to be dirty, f 
untidy, wasteful, slatternly. Its mistress had never ji 
seen anything better, had seldom had a chance 
to train. 

The position grew to be accepted as the best 
for a coloured girl, infinitely preferable to that of 
matrimony with one of her own shade. There was 
no loss of caste, indeed the girl gained by being 
associated with the white man. It came to be 
that the man would give a bond to pay down a 
certain sum upon his marrying or leaving the 
island to the girl he had chosen for his temporary 
mate, and it not infrequently happened that this? 
sum was so great that he was virtually unable ever 
to leave her. They say that many a coloured man 
made such a bargain for his daughter. 

But this was in the days when life was easier 11 
for the slave, when a coloured man had some rights, | 
even though no white man would sit at meat with 
him or marry his daughter. 

It was sometimes very hard on the children of 
such alliances. Madden gives a vivid account of af 
visit he paid to an estate that had belonged to an' 1 



GONE TO WRACK AND RUIN 265 

uncle of his, and that had been mismanaged and 
gone to wrack and ruin. 

" I arrived at the ruined works of Marly after 
a fatiguing ride of five hours in the wildest district 
of St Mary's Mountains," he writes. " The dwelling- 
house was situated on a mountain eminence " (they 
always are) "about two hundred feet above the 
works, the remains of a little garden that had pro- 
bably been planted by the old proprietor was still 
visible on the only level spot in front of the house, 
a few fruit trees only remained, but it seemed 
from the place that had been enclosed, and was 
marked by a long line of scattered stones, the 
soil that was now covered with weeds had been 
formerly laid out in flower plots. In going from 
the ruined works to the house, I missed my road 
amidst the rank verdure which nearly obliterated 
every trace of a path ; so that I traversed a con- 
siderable part of the property without meeting a 
human being. The negro huts at some distance 
from the house were all uninhabited ; the roofs of 
them had tumbled in, and had the appearance of 
being long unoccupied. The negro boy who accom- 
panied me was very anxious for me to return to 
Claremont, and said it was no good to walk about 
such a place, buckras all dead, niggers all dead too, 
no one lived there but duppies and Obeah men. 
It was certainly as suitable a place for such folk 
as one could well imagine. I proceeded, however, 
to the house and went through the ceremony of 
knocking at the door, but received no answer; the 
door was ajar and I took the liberty of walking 
into the house of my old uncle. 

The room I entered was in keeping with the 
condition of the exterior, every plank in the naked 
room was crumbling to decay. I opened one of 



266 THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

the side doors, and, to my great surprise, I per- 
ceived two women as white as any inhabitants of 
any southern climates, and tolerably well clad, 
standing at an opposite window, evidently alarmed 
at my intrusion. I soon explained to them the 
nature of my visit, and requested permission to 
rest for a short time after my fatiguing journey. 
In a few minutes two other young females and a 
very old mulatto woman of a bright complexion 
made their appearance from an adjoining room, 
and what was my surprise at learning that the two 
youngest were the natural daughters of Mr Gordon, 
the person who purchased the property out of 
Chancery, the two others, the daughters of my 
uncle, Mr Theodosius Lyons, and the old woman 
their mother ! The eldest of her daughters was 
about forty years of age, the other probably a year 
or two younger ; and the resemblance of one of 
them to some members of my family was so strik- 
ing that the moment her name was mentioned I 
had no difficulty in recognising her origin. The 
poor women were delighted to see a person who 
called himself a relation of their father; but with 
the feeling there was evidently a good deal of 
suspicion mingled as to the motives of my visit, 
and of apprehensions that I had come there for 
the purpose of taking possession of the property; 
and all I could say to remove this impression was 
certainly thrown away, on the old woman at least. 

I do not wonder at it, for they had received 
nothing but bad treatment from those who ought 
to have been kind to them, as well as from 
strangers for nearly forty years since the death 
of their natural protector, who dying suddenly left 
them utterly unprovided for. They were left free, 
but that was all. One son, however, was not left 



SOLD WITH REST OF MOVABLE PROPERTY 267 

free ; and that young man was sold with the rest 
of the movable property of the estate when it was 
sold in Chancery. The aged and infirm negroes 
were then left on the estate ; but a few years ago 
these poor creatures who had grown old on the 
property and had expended the strength of their 
young days on its cultivation, and who imagined 
that they would have been allowed to have laid 
their bones where their friends and relatives were 
buried, were carried away by the creditors and 
actually sold for three or four dollars a head." 

"Who," Madden asks, "in the face of such 
circumstances as these will tell me that slavery in 
these colonies was productive of no oppression in 
recent times, or was the occasion of no injustices ? " 

He dilates on the undoubted fact that many a 
West Indian proprietor could not be got to look 
upon Jamaica as his home. He wanted to get as 
much money as he could out of the estate, and 
then to retire to his native land. So all improve- 
ments were grudged, " The Great House fell into 
decay, the roads were left without any adequate 
repair, the plantation was cultivated for its present 
advantages and without regard for its prospective 
ones ; and the system of labour exacted from the 
negroes was productive of circumstances, which the 
proprietor considered in combination with the other 
discomforts of his situation, were unsuitable to the 
condition of a woman of refinement accustomed to the 
enjoyments of English society." 

He speaks very highly of the coloured mistresses ; 
although he deplores such connections, and says : 
" They cannot be defended, but I think the victims 
of the state of things which led to them are more 
deserving of pity than of reproach. I do not 
remember to have heard of the fidelity of anyone 



268 THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

of these persons being called into question. In 
the periods of their prosperity they know their 
situation, and demean themselves accordingly. In 
their adversity, when death or pecuniary embarrass- 
ments deprive them of the protection they may have 
had for many years, their industry and frugality 
deserve the highest praise." 

The 1st of August 1834, the day when the 
slaves passed from slavery to a position of apprentice- 
ship, was looked forward to in Jamaica with dread 
on the part of the whites, and, says Madden, with 
extravagant hopes by the blacks. But it passed. 
The servile race made one little step upward, and 
not a single riot occurred in the island, "not a 
single man, woman or child was butchered to make 
a negro holiday." As a matter of fact, the negroes 
went to church. 

"I visited three of the sectarian chapels on the 
1st of August," says Madden, " during the morning, 
mid-day, and evening services ; and I was greatly 
gratified at the pains that were taken to make the 
negroes sensible of the nature of the change that 
had taken place in their condition, and the great 
benefits they had to show their gratitude for, under 
Him Who had brought them out of bondage, to 
their benefactors both at home and in England, 
who expected of them to be good Christians, good 
citizens, and good servants." 

He does indeed recall one little incident. A 
drunken sailor was tormented by some small black 
boys. They threw stones at him, and as he reeled 
after them they scampered away, shouting most 
lustily to each other. 

"What for you run away? We all free now. 
Buckra can't catch we. Hurra for fuss of Augus ! 
hi ! hi ! fuss of Augus ! hurra for fuss of Augus ! " 



THE PENALTY FOR FALSE SWEARING 269 

On that night, too, there was a grand ball given 
by the black and brown people, to which the General 
and his Staff were invited. "Miss Quashaba, 
belonging to Mr C, led off with Mr Cupid, belonging 
to Mr M., while Mrs Juno, belonging to Mr P., 
received the blacks and buckras," 

It took a long while to shake off the shackles. 

Besides, we must never forget there was a kindly 
side to slavery. Many of the white people took 
a great interest in their slaves, and at the slave 
balls many a slave girl was decked out in her 
mistress's jewels. Indeed, there was much competition 
among the ladies as to whose waiting-maid should 
make the best show. 

They received instruction, too, these slaves, and 
sometimes the instruction given was extraordinary 
enough. Madden tells how on one occasion a girl 
was brought before him to give evidence against 
a fellow apprentice. He asked if she knew the 
nature of an oath, and her mistress was a little 
hurt that a girl of seventeen, who had been in her 
charge for so long, should be asked such a question. 
Nevertheless, he persisted in asking the question, 
and the girl replied, to the no small discomfiture of 
her mistress and the surprise of the crowded Court — 
" Massa, if me swear false my - belly would burst, 
my face would be scratched, and my fingers would 
drop off!" And Madden dismissed the case for 
want of better testimony, though really, I think, 
if the girl feared such unpleasant things would 
happen to her if she lied, he might have trusted 
her to tell the truth. But that, I am aware, is a 
very modern view. 

Slavery was abolished for good and all in 1838. 
The intention, when Madden came to the island, 
was to abolish it in 1840, but the apprenticeship 



270 THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

which was substituted seems to have been very 
unsatisfactory, and I have read books by Quaker 
and Baptist missionaries which are full of the 
suffering of the freed slaves under these conditions. 
Up till 1734 the owners had the right to punish 
their slaves by mutilation, which, of course, often 
meant death, but though it was abolished, there are 
many ways, as we have seen, of making the life of 
a slave unbearable. If the apprentice did not please 
his master he sent him to the nearest workhouse, 
and many are the ghastly tales of the tired men 
and women worked in the tread -mill. It takes a 
long, long while for mercy and pity and kindly 
friendliness to make its way. 

Madden shows us too a side of slavery which 
I confess had not struck me. 

"The law, as it now stands," he writes, "does 
permit the father to hold his own son in bondage, 
and the son to demand the wages of slavery from 
his own mother, and to claim the services of his 
own sister as his bondswoman. These horrors are 
not merely possible contingencies that may be 
heard of occasionally ; they are actual occurrences, 
two of which came before me within the last three 
months. 

A Jew of this town had a young mulatto man 
taken up for refusing to pay wages. It turned out 
that these wages were demanded from his own son, 
his child by one of his negro slaves. ... I most 
reluctantly fixed for that obdurate father the wages 
of a son's slavery, but in amount the lowest sum 
I had ever ordered." 

And it was not always the whites who were 
the unkind and grasping masters. A free black 
came before him on one occasion, claiming the 
services of a runaway slave and her four children. 



A DANIEL COME TO JUDGMENT 271 

She had been absent for many months, and in 
support of his claim the plaintiff adduced the fact 
that she was his sister, the daughter of his own 
mother, and that both mother and daughter had 
been bequeathed to him, and the mother had died 
in slavery. The astonished magistrate puts it on 
record that he could hardly believe his own ears. 
Only, unfortunately, there was no manner of doubt 
as to the legality of his claim. 

But Madden was something of a Solomon. He 
told the woman she must prepare to go back, they 
were all slaves, or at least apprentices except the 
youngest, who was not six years of age, but he 
would defer giving his decision for a couple of days, 
so that as many of the coloured population of 
Kingston as possible might be afforded the oppor- 
tunity of witnessing the event. The claimant in 
vain protested that he was quite willing to receive 
back his slaves without any such public ceremony, 
but the magistrate was adamant. He assured the 
claimant that no pains would be spared to give 
the decision in his favour all the solemnity which 
the utmost publicity could give it. There was such 
a buzz of approval in the Court that the master 
was in little doubt as to what would happen a couple 
of days later, so he said he thought of giving the 
woman her liberty, or at any rate allowing her 
to buy it at a very low rate, but the children he 
would have, and no price would induce him to 
relinquish his claim to them. The poor mother 
looked the picture of despair. He should have 
them, declared the just magistrate ; it should be 
out of the power of any human being in Jamaica 
for the future to dispute his claim or to call in 
question the title by which he had held his own 
mother in slavery till the day of her death. The 



272 THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

Court was with the magistrate and against the 
black slave-holder, for at last he said in a low tone 
he would give his sister her freedom, and Madden 
promptly drew up the manumission paper. But 
when the black man read it over he refused to 
sign. Madden made a dramatic scene of it. He 
knew he had the sympathy of the Court for the 
woman. 

"I was in the act of tearing up the document 
when the audible groans of his own people induced 
him again to take the paper. I allowed myself to 
be persuaded to let him have it — the paper was 
in his hand — humanity did not guide it but shame 
did — he signed the paper, and never was there 
a manumission performed with so bad a grace." 

The man still claimed the children, but he had 
to deal with not only a very kindly man, but a 
very wise one, whose heart was full of pity for 
the poor mother, who evidently had no faith in the 
kindliness of her brother. The two little boys, 
mulattoes of seven and eight — the oldest the man 
had already — clung terrified to their mother, and 
the magistrate had them and the complainant placed 
before the bench "to prevent any sudden disappear- 
ance." Then, with the wisdom of the serpent, he 
began to praise this man's generosity, "to extol 
his humanity and to put his heart on the best of 
terms with itself," and finally he got the freedom of 
those two little children. Clever, kind, Dr Madden ! 

In contrast to this black man he tells the story 
of a Mr Anderson, from whom he desired to buy 
the freedom of a slave, an Arabic scholar, a man 
who had come from the hinterland of the Guinea 
Coast, from Timbuctoo, was well born, and had had 
such an education as that town afforded. Madden 
hoped to raise the money by public subscription, 



A VERY EXCEPTIONAL MAN 273 

for he could not afford it himself, for this was a 
very exceptional man, worth over £300. 

" Say no more," said his master at once. The man 
had been a good servant to him — a faithful and a 
good negro — and he would take no money for him 
— he would give him his liberty ! 

" I pressed him to name any reasonable sum for 
his release but he positively refused to receive 
one farthing in the way of indemnity for the loss 
of that man's services ! " 

It is refreshing to read such a story. 

How much slavery was liked we may judge from 
the fact that even now with freedom within a few 
years of them — six at the very most — many a slave 
was anxious to purchase his freedom from the 
apprenticeship system. He had to apply to the 
special justice, and he called upon the master to 
appoint a local magistrate, and the two magistrates 
meeting, named a third, who must also be a local 
magistrate, two for the master and one for the 
slave ; and then according to the age, sex, health, 
and occupation of the slave in question they decided 
his value. The amount to be adjudicated was left 
entirely to the discretion of the magistrates without 
reference to any scale of valuation, and in some 
instances the valuation rose to- £170 "a sum which 
no negro certainly has sold for for many a long 
year in Jamaica," says Madden. 

As a rule, according to Madden, the value of a 
slave did not run so high. He says, in all eighty 
apprentices obtained their freedom before him either 
by valuation or by mutual agreement, and the average 
valuation was £25. It does not seem much for the 
services of a man, even if it were only for four 
years. In one instance, a tradesman was valued 
at £80, but as a rule the price ranged between 



274 THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

£16 and £35. Madden says he attended a great 
many slave sales, and has never seen a negro sell 
for more than £30. 

When slaves were condemned to death for any 
offences, it was extraordinary the value their masters 
put upon them. At first £40 was considered ample 
indemnity, but it rose, till at last £180 sterling was 
asked from the public funds for indemnity for a 
slave condemned to death. 

" This indemnity," says Madden, " ought to be 
abolished, it is a bonus on negro executions," And 
he cites a case in which an owner received £605 
for his executed slaves, "however little he might 
have desired to have profited by such means, while for 
as many living negroes when the compensation is 
paid, he will receive from the British Government 
probably about £240." 

Peace did not come with the apprenticeship. The 
planters seem to have resented it immensely, and 
feeling ran high. Their first act was to take from 
the negroes all those allowances and customary 
gratuities which were not literally specified in the 
new law. They were free — well, they should see 
what freedom was like. 

Then after the 1st of August, according to 
Madden, there were various outrages committed not 
by the negroes but by the whites upon the blacks, 
and it was exceedingly hard to get a conviction. 

"A planter," he writes, "has been indicted for 
shooting at an old woman, and after wounding her 
severely, discharging the second barrel at her, 
but fortunately without effect. The grand jury 
ignored the bill. 

Another gentleman was indicted for an outrage 
on a sick negro woman. The grand jury ignored the 
bill. 



WORTH £40 STERLING 275 

Another planter was indicted for the murder of 
his negro by shooting him, and was sentenced to 
nine months' imprisonment. 

Another gentleman, an overseer, was committed 
to jail a few weeks ago for the murder of a boy, by 
shooting at a number of negroes assembled in a hut 
in the act of singing hymns. He has not yet been 
tried, but from the exertions making for him I 
have no expectation he will be convicted. 

Another gentleman was tried . . . for causing 
one of his negroes to be severely torn by dogs, for 
going without permission to bury his wife, who had 
been dead three days, and who had been refused 
sufficient time to prepare her coffin. 

The strenuous exertions of the Chief Justice 
obtained a conviction. He was fined £100. 

But in the majority of cases convictions are not 
to be expected." 

How strangely it reads in these days. 

Before he closes his book he goes on to analyse 
the price of slaves, and arrives at the conclusion that 
the average price of all the slaves that have been im- 
ported into the West Indies may be estimated at 
about £40 sterling. 

All the sorrow, all the woo, all the long drawn- 
out suffering, and yet each individual for his life 
might be counted as worth £40 sterling ! 

I have found no chronicler who describes the 
actual freeing in the same graphic way as Madden 
told us of the apprenticeship. I think we may bo 
sorry for both sides. 

We must pity the helpless black man who had 
been accustomed to guidance all his days, adrift 
in a land where he owned nothing, and had not 
the faintest idea either of the value of his services 



276 THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

or the cost of his own upkeep. We may pity the 
planters who had to work their estates with labour 
in such an uncomfortable state of unrest. 

For five and twenty years a. sort of ominous 
peace reigned. Neither the planters nor their whilom 
slaves were content. There seems to have been a 
sort of feeling among the whites which is best 
represented as — " Well, you've got your freedom ! 
Now are you as well off as when as slaves we 
took care of you ! " And very often I am afraid 
they took care their black helots should not be 
as well off. 

Not that the coloured people did not advance. 
They did. But their advancement was a threat. 
In the streets of untidy Kingston the coloured and 
black people met and grumbled and discussed local 
politics at all the street corners, the very conventicles 
where they went to pray were hotbeds of discontent. 
It is no good saying they were ungrateful. They 
were not. They had rights, but it always takes a 
long time to make those who will suffer in the 
conferring of a great benefit understand that in 
spite of their discomfort that benefit the good of 
the greater number, must be conferred. I can 
quite understand the black people vaguely wanting 
the rights they did not understand, to land, to 
better pay, to education, and the white people 
saying — "What are we to do for service? These 
people are clods. They cannot appreciate such 
privileges. Why make a fuss about them % " 

A planter would say — " That man ! " in tones 
of scorn, "why, I remember him a little yellow 
piccaninny, the son of my black mammy, and there 
he is in a high collar and tall hat in the Assembly, 
laying down the law to his betters. Damned 
impudence ! In my father's time his back would 



THE RISING AT MORANT BAY 277 

soon have made acquaintance with the 'cat.' That 
would straighten him out ! " And both coloured 
and white would be bitterer for the recollection. 

I think there was a certain fear among the 
whites of the growing power among the blacks. 
A desire to keep the subject race in its place. 

Naturally, most naturally. I am sure had I 
lived in those times I should have sided with 
them, for a black man, ignorant and aggrieved, and 
armed with a hoe or a machete can be a very 
unpleasant opponent. 

The brooding discontent grew and grew, fomented, 
said the white people by men of the half-blood like 
George William Gordon, men of some standing and 
education, and at last on the 11th October 1865, at 
Morant Bay in the east of the island, the place where 
the people from Nevis had settled in the seventeenth 
century, the smouldering discontent burst into flame. 
The blacks rose, overwhelmed the volunteers by 
sheer numbers and slew not only all the white 
magistrates assembled in the Courthouse, but among 
them a black man who was much respected among 
the white people and had risen to be a magistrate. 

The tale of rebellion seems always the same. 
The assailed have feared and feared, and yet when 
the moment comes, are taken by . surprise. It was 
so now. Twenty-two civilians were killed, thirty - 
four wounded and nearly all the public buildings 
in Morant Bay were burnt down. Edward John 
Eyre was Governor of Jamaica at the time. 

In Australia Eyre had been a great man. 
Wonderfully he had explored desolate lands ; he was 
Protector to the Aborigines, and counted a man 
who was just to colour. But Jamaica broke him. 

The whites fled before the blacks in the first rush, 
as it has ever been. There were women and children 

T 



278 THE FREEING OF THE SLAVE 

crouching in the wet jungle at night, fearing for 
their lives, and because of those who feared, and 
those who were dead, the whites gathered themselves 
together, proclaimed martial law, and took ample — 
nay, bloody — vengeance. But martial law was not 
proclaimed in Kingston, and because it was not 
proclaimed there, Gordon, who had been born a 
slave, the son of his master, and had risen to a 
place in the Assembly, was taken out of Kingston, 
and after a hasty trial hanged by martial law as 
instigator of the rebellion on, it is said, very scanty 
evidence. Under that same law 439 coloured men 
suffered death — 354 by sentence of the court-martial, 
and the others shot by those employed in putting 
down the rebellion, soldiers, sailors, and our old 
friends the Maroons. And after martial law ceased, 
147 more were put to death, while everywhere negro 
houses went up in flames. 

In truth they put down that rebellion with a 
heavy hand, for the white man feared the black, who 
outnumbered him fifty to one. 

There was a storm over it in England. But 
it was all very well for the people there, safe in 
their easy-chairs, to judge those who had quenched 
the negro rebellion. Everyone of them would 
probably have been on the side of Eyre had they 
been in Jamaica in the month of October 1865. 
Many, doubtless, mourned Gordon, the champion 
of the black man, put to death on such insufficient 
evidence. His looks may belie him, but he does 
not look a philanthropist. All the white people 
on the island crowded to bid Eyre farewell when 
he and his family left Kingston, for they regarded 
the prompt measures he had taken as having 
saved the country from all the horrors of a black 
insurrection. And in speaking of " black " here I 



BLACK AND WHITE ARE AGREED 279 

mean simply mob rule, the condition of affairs that 
must needs prevail when the ignorant get the upper 
hand. Pity is forgotten, riot and flame and blood- 
shed prevail. And from this Eyre undoubtedly saved 
Jamaica. 

Punch took his side and had a cartoon in which 
the shade of Palmerston reproaches Disraeli, and 
says that he would never have abandoned Eyre. 

" Ye savages thirsting for bloodshed and plunder, 
Ye miscreants burning for rapine and prey ; 
By the fear of the lash and the gallows kept under 
Henceforth, who shall venture to stand in your way ? 
Run riot, ravage, kill without pity, 
Let any man how he molest you beware ; 
Beholding how hard the Jamaica Committee 
To ruin are trying to hunt gallant Eyre," 

wrote Punch, and it represents the feeling of a 
large section of the community, a section to which 
I know I should have belonged. Punch does not 
enter into the question as to why there should be 
"savages thirsting for bloodshed and plunder," and 
" miscreants burning for rapine and prey." Those 
were not the question of the moment. They are 
questions for all time. 

We think now, we are all agreed, black and 
white, that there must be no bloodshed and plunder, 
and there must be no section of the community to 
whom such a state of things shall seem desirable. 



CHAPTER XII 

JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

Dorinda came home from church. She had on a 
neat, blue cotton dress, a snow-white handkerchief 
was wrapped round her head, her pretty black feet 
were bare, and her comely dark face stood clear 
cut in the evening light against the white wall of 
the house. 

" What church do you belong to, Dorinda ? " 

" Baptist, missus." So she was one of the Black 
Family, the church that bravely tried first to teach 
the slaves. 

" And have you been baptised ? " 

"No, missus. I'm an enquirer." It troubled 
her mistress a little that Dorinda often felt the 
strong need to " enquire " sometime, when the table 
should be laid or the silver cleaned. 

But an " enquirer " exactly represents my attitude 
towards Jamaica. I'm an enquirer still, though 
I lived there for over eighteen months, and every 
day I learned something. Indeed, much to my 
surprise, I find I sometimes appear to know a great 
deal more than many of the people who have lived 
there all their lives. It reminds me of an American 
tourist I met once at the Myrtle Bank, Jamaica's 
principal hotel — "My dear," she said, "I've been a 
great traveller of late, and I'm just full up of 
information, mostly wrong." 



THE NATIONALITY OF JAMAICA 281 

Still, there are some things I can see for myself. 
They are forced upon me like a slap in the face. 
Kingston was a disappointment. It is a dust-heap, 
somewhat ill-kept ; there is none of the lush luxuri- 
ance of the tropics one expects from its latitude. 
Out of Kingston — in it too for that matter — it is 
very difficult for those not blessed with a superfluity 
of this world's goods to live in Jamaica comfortably, 
simply and inexpensively ; the mosquitoes are a 
nuisance, the ticks run them a very good second, 
and the post office facilities are the very worst in 
the world. 

Having relieved my mind of my objections to 
the country, I may say I have found it a lovely land, 
its people as hospitable and kind as its post office 
is bad — which is saying a good deal — and I enjoyed 
my stay there so much that I wanted to settle there. 

When I first landed, it struck me the country 
was black, and then I learned its nationality. 

" What countrywoman are you, Frances ? " I asked 
the lady who condescended to destroy my clothes 
under the pretence of washing them. Frances 
grinned all over her black face — well, not exactly 
black but mahogany red, with a skin so fine the 
greatest lady in the land might envy her. 

"Me, missus, me British, missus." And British 
she and her like are for weal or woe. Strongly 
against their wills Britain forced her nationality 
upon their fathers, and now they are as loyal sons 
and daughters of the Empire as are to be found 
under the Union Jack. Woe be to Britain if she 
does not treat these her children well. 

There came into the harbour at Kingston, the 
lovely harbour which is not half appreciated, a war- 
ship with the Stars and Stripes at her peak, and the 
black men in the streets and all along the harbour 



JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

shores looked i»n with the greatest interest More 
than one man took off the ugly tourist cap with 
Mi deep peak which seems a speciality of Jamaica, 
and scratched bis wool thoughtfully and then one 

was found to voice the thoughts of the res!. 

"All!" said he. "but wait till our Temeraire 
comes along." It is I who emphasise the "our," 

D01 they. To them it seems quite natural. She is 
theira And truly T think this people have bought 
their nationality with their blood it' ever people 
have. Kingston is full of these Iiritous. 

At first I was inclined to grumble because the 
houses all Beemed in need of paint, all Looked dusty 
and untidy, and all wanted mending in places, all 

the gardens needed water, in fact, but for the 
Baving grace of the Myrtle Bank Hotel, I should 
have damned Kingston utterly. But I took the 
Psalmist's advice and lifted my eyes to the hills, 

and I saw wh.i! a Lovely world was this to whieh 
I had come. There was a harbour, a harbour that 
will hold a Meet, a great sheet of blue water 
sparkling in the sunshine, fringed all round with 
the riotous green of the tropics, and behind were 
tli- Blue Mountains, a glorious setting for man's 
untidy handiwork. There is range upon range of 
hills, their peaks clean - cut against the blue sky, 
with little cloudlets nestling in their folds, and 
dark blue shadows marking the deeper gullies. A 
splendid range of mountains they would be in any 
land, but here they are close, close so that any man 
may leave the hot and dusty street and may rest in 
their gullies, with the refreshing smell of damp earth 
and dewy vegetation in his nostrils. 

This is a marked characteristic, one of the great 
charms of Jamaica. Nowhere in the world that I 
have been, have I found in a small area so many 



PRIMEVAL BUT POPULATED 283 

points of vantage from which may be seen beautiful 
views. Again and again have I climbed — nay, 
usually a motor or a buggy carried me^ — to a hill- 
top or a hillside, and there stretching below me 
was the sea, the ever changing sea, while around 
were range alter range of hills with the cloud 
shadows resting upon them. There are broad- 
leaved banana plantations on their slopes, the 
villages are embedded in mango and bread-fruit 
trees, the vivid green of sugar plantations is in the 
rich bottoms, a house here and there gives life to 
the scene, but the rugged rocks, crowned by tall 
trees, are the same Columbus saw. Here a sym- 
metrical broad leaf stands out clear against the 
blue sky, every branch outlined, and here mahogany, 
niahoe, and the giant cotton tree, cedar and sweet- 
wood and a dozen other trees grow close together, 
close and tall, struggling up to the sunshine, mark- 
ing by their stature and their girth the wealth of the 
soil that has given them birth. 

Sometimes, often indeed, a tropical storm sweeps 
over these hills, for nowhere in the island is the 
rainfall less than 30 inches in the year, and in many 
places in the mountains that amount falls in a month, 
and anyone who has the temerity to be out in the 
downpour has a great broad banana leaf on his head 
and over the bundle he is carrying. 

I have never seen a country that seemed so 
primeval and yet was so well populated, for we 
must admit that close on a million people in an 
island, a little larger than half the size of Wales, 
makes for fairly close habitation, and in the remoter 
corners far away from civilisation as distance goes 
in the island, there are everywhere small shacks 
where dwell the country folk. When the shacks 
are verv far from the main road, I know that the 



284 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

owner is an ill-used man, for the Jamaican peasant 
likes company. His idea of bliss is to have a house 
right on the road, where he can converse with all 
and sundry who pass by, and keep in touch with 
the life of the island. He would not give a "thank 
you" for permission to live in the empty Great 
House on the hill above. 

And that is another curious condition of Jamaica, 
the number of Great Houses empty and going fast 
to decay. I have seen some, like " Stonehenge," 
just a heap of rubble, and others like the Hyde, 
that except for a day or two once every six weeks 
are entirely given over to the bats and the rats, 
and the other pests of Jamaica. Really quite a 
large number of the New Poor of England could 
be comfortably housed in the empty Great Houses 
of Jamaica. Well, perhaps that is a forgivable 
exaggeration. But Jamaica is like England, the 
majority of people cannot afford to live in her 
Great Houses built for the days when there were 
servants and slaves a-plenty, and there was no 
thought of modern improvements. 

The Jamaican negro usually does not have his 
plantation round his home. As in the old slave 
days he has it at some distance away, often so far 
that he must needs stay there at night to guard it. 
The idea, I believe, is that he saves the land round 
his home for the time when his legs shall be too 
old to carry him to a great distance. Still, round 
the shack itself may often be seen the poles sup- 
porting the green vines of yams, and often there is 
a breadfruit tree, its leafy arms stretching out 
hospitably, its handsome leaves glimmering and 
glinting in the sunshine, and in the season when 
it is well grown its fruit will support a village. 
He probably also has a few bananas or plantains, 



KEEPING A DOG AT HOME 285 

and there is sometimes a primitive mill, with a blind- 
folded mule going slowly round and round, crushing 
the cane for the coarse head sugar that the black 
man loves. There are some hens scratching happily, 
for there is plenty for a hen to eat, a goat or two 
is tethered on a patch of grass, for the children 
want milk, and there is a pig, the only animal the 
negro feels bound to feed. He grows yams and 
corn and cocos for his hog, but his poor mongrel 
dog is so starved as a rule (I have seen brilliant 
exceptions), it makes your heart ache. 

When we lived at the Hyde, the mongrel dogs 
belonging to the " Busha" and some of the labourers 
were the plague of our lives. They were always 
ranging the place in search of scraps. On one 
occasion we did remonstrate as forcibly as we 
dared with a black man who owned an unfortunate 
starving puppy whose bones stood out of its skin, 
and the next day the poor brute arrived, starved as 
ever, with a bleeding stump where its tail should 
have been. On its heels came its angry master. 
And we were also angry. 

"I dun all me can, missus," he explained. "He 
will come. Me cut off him tail an' burry him an' 
tie him on top. It sure ting him stay wid him 
tail but him brack de 'tring." 

Poor things ! Poor things ! The sufferings of 
the dogs and indeed of all animals in Jamaica at 
the hands of unthinking black men ! 

A self-contained establishment is the Jamaican 
shack. Sometimes it is built of wattle, as the huts 
to-day are built on the Gambia, whence came the 
Mandingo slaves, sometimes mud is daubed on the 
wattle, as it is on the Gold Coast, sometimes it is 
built of rough logs and it is thatched with palm 
leaves, or, as the family rises in the social scale, with 



286 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

shingle. In it apparently dwell a large family, ranging 
from the old granny whose age no man knoweth, 
to the new-born baby of her great grand-daughter, 
a baby born into a new world where life I know will 
be easier for it and hold more advantages than it 
did for the old woman who sits nodding in the 
shade. Perhaps the hut belongs to her. It often 
seemed to me that the hut did belong to the women, 
even as they do in the country from which they 
came. 

All the cultivator, man or woman, need buy is 
the scanty household furnishing, and a very limited 
supply of clothing for the elders and the younger 
children. The older boys and girls soon learn to 
provide for themselves. It is quite easy to live off 
the land, and if more money is wanted there is 
always a cattle pen or a sugar estate handy where 
wages can be earned. When the emancipation 
came, the angry planter declared he wanted no 
idle vagabonds upon his estate, and did his best 
to break up the old slave villages. Now as the 
manager of a sugar estate told me he likes to 
have his labour close, and he at least was en- 
couraging the negroes once more to build upon his 
plantation. Not that the negro works very hard as 
yet. The hard-working toiler of the north would be 
surprised at the easy-going ways of these children 
of the sun. A man will work I am told four days 
a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 
but he has his wages on Friday night, so he does 
no work on Saturday, it is market day. Sunday of 
course is a day of rest, everyone knows it would 
be wicked to work on Sunday, and Monday is 
banana day — the day when the bananas are taken 
down to the port. All the roads down from the 
mountains, the roads that those in authority have 



SERVING THE EMPIRE 287 

decreed shall be as far as is possible without shade, 
are lined with people mostly women and girls bearing 
on their heads great bunches of green bananas, which 
are sold to the fruit companies or at their collecting 
depots about the country. A fruitful land! It 
strikes me forcibly, for I am fresh from reading the 
wails of the slave owners — "the negroes will not 
increase." Will any wild things kept in captivity 
increase ? But put those same wild things in suitable 
environment. Miss Maxwell Hall has a story about 
this increase. 

She interested herself to get a pen boy of hers 
into one of the contingents going to the war. He 
wanted to serve the Empire — his Empire. He 
was a stalwart young fellow, but enquiries had to 
be made about those dependent upon him. Then 
she found that he was the father of eleven children, 
five by one woman and six by two other women ! 
They were all alive and there was every probability 
of more ! He had already served the Empire so well 
that the Government felt he had better stay at home 
and see to the proper upbringing of the hostages he 
had given to fortune. 

No wonder there are thronged roads, but there 
should be more cultivated patches. The cultivation 
should be like that of Provence, for this is a fruitful 
country, although people talk of its being so poor. 
Miss Maxwell Hall, that most capable young pen- 
keeper, says— " For years everyone has been engaged 
in taking money out of Jamaica. No one ever seems 
to have thought of putting money into the land, of 
working the country for itself." Exactly what 
Madden said ninety years before. 

Does this explain the desolate looking towns 
set amidst such fertile lands ? There are poor. 
I saw them every day, but why they are so poor 



288 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

I do not know. All the civilised world is crying 
out for just such small products as the negro can 
supply, cold storage is the order of the day, why 
then are there any poor in Jamaica ? Possibly a 
discreet knowledge of the growing powers of the 
soil is lacking, and also there is no doubt manual 
labour is despised. 

With whip and chain the white man taught the 
black — drove the thought into him with the branding 
iron — that manual labour was a despicable thing, some- 
thing only to be undertaken by those who could do 
no better, and we cannot undo that teaching in a 
few years. Indeed it is only in the last few years, 
only since the cruel war which has made us all so 
wise, that Britain herself learned the lesson. 

I have always been keenly interested in openings 
for women, and inclined to be wrathful when other 
women talk as if matrimony were the only career for 
a woman. Of course matrimony is good for a 
woman, exactly as it is for a man, but I have always 
felt strongly that it is for the nation's good that 
every woman should go down into the arena and 
work for her living as a man does. If she marry — 
well — she will know better how to bring up her 
own sons and daughters, and if she do not marry — 
also well She will have made a place for herself 
in the world, and can hold up her head as a valuable 
citizen. 

Feeling this strongly, it is no wonder that one of 
the most interesting happenings of my stay in 
Jamaica was my coming upon Charlotte Maxwell 
Hall, a young woman who is entering upon a career 
I should have loved at her age. She is young, 
extremely good looking, if she will allow me to say 
so, charming, and, above all, she is strenuous and 
vivid with energy — indomitable. She is the Govern- 




Photo by] 



Mango Walk, Kempshot (see p. 169). 



[C. Maxwell Hall. 




Photo by] 



Looking up at Kempshot. 



[C. Maxwell Hall. 



[Fact page 2S3. 



MISS MAXWELL HALL 289 

ment Meteorologist, and she is managing the cattle 
pen which her father bought forty years ago, long 
before she was born. She lives up at Kempshot, 
on top of the highest hill for miles round, which 
has one of the loveliest views in lovely Jamaica, and 
she is gradually working that 600 acres of rough 
hill country into a beautiful park, where the pastures 
are walled by stone walls as they are in Derbyshire 
or Northern China, walls built from the stones picked 
off the pastures, which must be put somewhere. She 
looks after her trees. She prunes ; why should not 
shelter trees be kept beautifully, says she, and she 
takes every opportunity of planting trees from other 
lands. And as for her cattle, they are tended under 
her own eyes, and she wages unceasing war against 
that plague of Jamaica, the tick. 

For the acquaintance — the friendship I think I 
may write now — of this young lady, I am indebted 
to my cook Malvina. We had left the Hyde and 
gone to live at Montego Bay, and the family wanted 
milk, wanted it rather badly, as Samuel Hyde 
Parsons, "young massa up at Hyde," was but a 
small person and milk is a precious commodity in 
Montego Bay. Many people got it out of a tin. 
We did at first. And Malvina suggested — "Why 
not missus writing to Miss Maxwell Hall ? Miss 
Maxwell Hall kindly supplying." 

I didn't know whether the lady would be " kindly 
supplying" or not, but I thought the offer of cash 
down might induce her to do so. 

And my letter brought me a visit from a laugh- 
ing girl in a motor, who said she did sell milk, 
rather to the horror of some of her relations who 
felt that the most she ought to do was to "oblige 
a few friends." She, finding her milk going to 
waste, had advanced a step further and did not 



290 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

see why she should not oblige herself, and had set to 
work putting that milk-walk upon a business basis. 

And there and then on the verandah looking out 
over the sea, we struck up a friendship based on 
my unbounded admiration for her and her work. 
Presently I was looking for a house without being 
able to find one that suited my needs, and she came 
to my rescue with an invitation to the three of us, 
myself, Eva and the baby, to go to Kempshot Pen. 

And there I saw a side of life which gave me 
not only great hopes of Jamaica, but for all the 
tropical possessions of Britain. Here was a place 
run — by a woman, a young woman — and run frankly 
for gain and for the good of all the people 
surrounding it. 

Charlotte Maxwell Hall is Jamaican born (of 
English parents) and she loves her home, and she 
is making a beginning of a new phase in that land. 
What she is doing to the surprise of her generation, 
the next generation will be keen on doing and they 
will regenerate Jamaica. 

Not that there are not rich pens and well kept 
pens, but they are managed by men and they are 
much greater in extent. 

Kempshot specially attracted me because it was 
run by a young woman of an age when many girls 
are thinking only of their amusement, run not only 
with the intention of getting every ounce of good 
out of the soil, but of putting back into that soil 
all the good that came out out of it. And the place 
where she earns her livelihood, the place where the 
slaves rose and ninety years ago drove Major Hall 
and his wife fleeing in the night down through the 
jungle for their very lives, bids fair to be a very 
jewel among homesteads, a model for all Jamaican 
homesteads. I only trust the loneliness of it will 



A USE FOR MAHOGANY TREES 291 

not drive her away. And then, of course, with a 
woman, and an attractive one, there is always the 
danger that some man may persuade her to marry 
him and he will carry her off. 

Oh, but some of those ladies Madden talks about, 
"accustomed to all the refinements of English 
society," would turn in their graves if they could 
see this their modern representative. She will be 
still in her youth when her years make her old 
enough to be the mother of the girls of his time. 
But then she arises long before dawn, she is riding 
or walking in boots and breeches, dogs at her heels, 
over the pen seeking with the eye of the master for 
defects as soon as the first glimmer of light comes 
over the mountains ; she rests in the middle of the 
day, but her work is hardly done when the sun 
sinks gorgeously to rest behind the tree-topped 
hills in the west. 

And she has her work cut out for her. For the 
negro, whether on her estate or, what is worse, on 
its borders, is intolerably wasteful of his property 
and other people's. For instance, she found on the 
land when it came into her hands two well-grown 
handsome trees which she discovered were mahogany 
trees. She hailed them with delight and gave them 
every attention. And then one day to her dismay 
she found her precious trees, trees nearly as old as 
herself, dying and past all hope, for some negro 
outside her boundaries had stripped the bark off 
them, because mahogany bark— and mahogany baric 
is difficult to get now in accessible places — makes 
the best floor stain! That is the sort of difficulty 
the man or woman who would do well by the 
country has to encounter in Jamaica. It takes the 
heart out of the worker. What was the good of 
storming and raging, the seventeen year old 



292 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

mahogany trees were dead, because a negro wanted 
to earn without trouble a few pence in Montego 
Bay. Again and again going the rounds, Miss 
Maxwell Hall finds that the black people haye 
ruthlessly cut down trees she is cherishing, cut 
them down for firewood, or to make shingles, or 
for a riding-whip or some other trifle. 

In my experience the negro peasant makes a 
very wasteful agriculturist. Sir Hugh Clifford I 
see, speaking of the countries from which the for- 
bears of the coloured Jamaican came, advocates 
that white men be not encouraged to settle in these 
lands, that they be left to the peasants. 

I see what he means. He deprecates the arrival 
of the white man, who comes as a bird of passage, 
anxious to take all he can out of the land before 
retiring after a certain number of years to enjoy 
his spoils — a well-earned, peaceful old age he would 
call it, an old age beginning somewhere about forty 
— in the country of his birth. 

The countries that go to make up the Empire 
should not be so treated. But I cannot think that 
the peasant on the soil is best left alone to work 
out his own salvation. He will work it out I 
suppose in time, but the cost will be heavy. I have 
watched the peasant in the Alpes Maritimes in 
France, I have seen the fishermen drawing their 
nets in the Italian B-iviera, and I have seen the 
negro in Jamaica and West Africa, and I unhesitat- 
ingly say that the cost of that working out is very 
heavy indeed. 

The fishermen complained bitterly — there are no 
more fish, only the little young ones, but they went 
on fishing relentlessly, taking every one, destroying 
those that were so small they fell through the fine 
meshes of the net on to the beach. 



RUINOUS AGRICULTURISTS 293 

" Oh, they take all," said a man looking on who 
spoke a little French, and he laughed. 

In Jamaica the peasant is a very wasteful, a 
ruinous agriculturist, the only thing he does not 
waste is his own health and energy. In West 
Africa the same accusation held good. The peasant 
ruthlessly burnt down the forest trees to make a 
place for his patch of food - stuffs, and when the 
land was worn out there he chose another spot 
and repeated the destruction. He does the same 
in Jamaica. 

In France it is the other way. The country is 
carefully tilled. The hillsides that would be barren 
anywhere else are blooming gardens, but the work- 
ing out bears cruelly on the individual, especially on 
the women. Look at the people, white people all, 
industrious, thrifty, admirable in many ways — and 
about as far advanced in civilisation as they were at 
the end of the eighteenth century! Their women are 
worn with toil, they are haggard and old, toothless 
crones, before they are thirty. All the joy and loveli- 
ness has gone out of their life. Up in the mountains 
they are devout enough, but they have no use for 
modern science, and as I saw them they are not as 
far advanced as many a negro I have met in Jamaica, 
even as the negroes are far behind the farmers of 
Australia and New Zealand. 

Now I am sure that most people will agree 
with me that the capable business man — and in 
"man " I include the capable of both sexes— the man 
with modern knowledge and training, the farseeing 
man who will settle in a country and give it the 
best of his years, will educate and help the peasant 
to get the most out of the laud and better his lot, 
who will bring up his children to follow in his 
footsteps, must be a boon in any land. The 

u 



294 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

ignorant peasant wastes ; in France his labour and 
strength in archaic methods of labour and life, in 
Jamaica and West Africa he wastes the timber, 
he wastes the animals he has under him, he wastes 
the soil, the earth brings forth not one-tenth of 
what it might under more enlightened rule. 

And I need not say what that increase would 
mean, not only to the peasant but to a great manu- 
facturing country like Great Britain. 

When I read about Garden Cities in England, 
and the necessity for women emigrating, I am full 
of wonder why someone with a little money does 
not start an agricultural colony in Jamaica. I can 
see no reason why the beautiful land should become 
the exclusive property of the rich fleeing from the 
northern winter. It should be an ideal place for 
people who are not rich, especially for women. Here 
is eternal summer, here are beautiful surroundings, 
here is a fertile soil crying out for cultivation, here 
is a large peasant population waiting for employment, 
here is an ample fruit supply, here should be milk 
and eggs and chickens in abundance ; here is no 
need of fires and furs, of winter clothing, of carpets 
and curtains, of heavy bedding. 

If a woman go to Canada or Australia she must 
use her hands — it will do her no harm, but many 
women do not like the prospect — but in Jamaica 
for many a long day to come there will be labour 
in plenty crying out for a guiding hand. All it 
seems to me that is required to make such settle- 
ments a great success is a little money — you cannot 
have land and plan to work it for nothing anywhere — 
a little common sense, and they would be a boon 
not only to Jamaica but to the Empire. Only one 
thing, two things, perhaps, I would insist on. All 
the windows must be built as are those in the south 



PREDIAL LARCENY 205 

of France and in Italy — like doors that open wide 
and let in an abundance of air, and not as they 
make them in Jamaica, sash fashion, after the custom 
of cold England. And no settler must live in a 
mosquito-proof room. He must clear away the 
mosquitoes. 

They talk about the Jamaican negro as dishonest, 
but I think that is to be attributed to ignorance, and 
will mend with better wages and better education. 
My servants, low as were their wages, might have 
been trusted as a rule with my money or my jewellery 
or even my clothes, and they only pilfered the flour 
and sugar and such like commodities which, con- 
sidering they fed themselves and these things were 
dear, was putting their sins on a par with that of 
the boy who steals sugar or apples ; but there is 
a form of larceny in Jamaica which is very crippling 
to industry, and which I have not heard of in any 
other land. The Jamaican peasant cannot for the 
life of him help predial larceny, that is field larceny. 
He steals not only from the well-to-do man with 
a large acreage, but from his neighbour and his friend. 
Before the yams are ready for digging, or the corn 
ready to be cut, comes along the predial thief and 
relieves the owner of a large portion of his crop. 
Whenever any man plants he must put in enough 
to supply the greedy robber, who is too lazy to 
plant for himself. Everyone expects part of his 
crop to be taken. It is the curse of the country. 

"Missus," said a black boy to Miss Maxwell 
Hall, "you buy my corn when him ripe?" 

" Have you any corn, Cyril ? " He rejoiced in thai 
high-sounding name. 

"Got good big plot, missus. Him ripe soon." 

"Very well," she said good-naturedly, anxious 
to help on the industrious, and passing over the 



296 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

fact that he had calmly taken her land without 
paying any rent. So the time went on and the 
fowls wanted food. 

" Where's that corn, Cyril ? " 

" Oh, missus ! " sighed Cyril, sad, but not 
surprised, "somebody tief him all." 

And his was the common lot. 

Near one of the big towns there was a man who, 
having a crop of roots from which he expected great 
things, took the trouble to sit up and watch by 
night with a shot-gun in his hand. He concealed 
himself, of course, and in the uncertain light of the 
early morning he saw a big figure stooping over 
his precious roots, and, aiming low, let fly. The dark 
figure scuffled away promptly, and the owner of the 
land was satisfied, because when the daylight came 
he found blood on the ground. 

" Now," he said to himself, " when I hear some 
man got sick in de laigs den I know who tief 
my yams." 

For a day or two nothing happened, and then 
it began to be rumoured that a well-known man, 
a man in quite a decent position in the community, 
had a curious swelling in his legs. 

"No can put foot to groun'," and the owner of 
the yams smiled. 

The sick man went to the hospital at last, though 
he stood off as long as he could, and those incon- 
siderate doctors, instead of applying the proper 
remedies, insisted upon enquiring into the cause of 
the trouble, which he felt was no business of theirs. 

"What were you doing?" asked the inquisitive 
leeches. 

"Cuttin' bush,' 1 said the patient ruefully, "an' 
me fall backwards into makra with bad thorn," and 
further investigation revealed the fact that at the 



A STRONG DESIRE TO PLEASE 297 

bottom of every makra thorn wound there was a 
large pellet such as would come out of a shot-gun ! 

But the patient insisted he had not been shot. 
He didn't want to be arrested for larceny ! But 
everybody about the place then knew that this 
well-to-do man had paid a night visit to his poorer 
neighbour's yam patch ! 

What the remedy for this evil is going to be 
I don't know. Of course everyone must see the 
cause. The curse of slavery that hung over the 
land for 250 years destroys every shred of self- 
respect. I put it to you, can a slave have any 
self-respect, a man who is not responsible for his 
own doings. He took everything he could get, 
honestly or dishonestly, he was fraudulently held 
himself, what did it matter to him whose property 
he took so long as he kept his back from the lash. 
And a standard of life that has been inculcated 
for so long is not likely to be altered in three 
generations, especially when for the greater part of 
that time these people have been most distressingly 
poor. 

I like the black man of Jamaica. No one can 
help liking him, and still more do I like the black 
woman, with her smiling face and her strong desire 
to please. But even in this strong desire to please I 
trace the mark of that cruel bondage that held the 
people for so long. Ask a peasant man or woman 
a simple question, how far, for instance, is a certain 
place, and he will not tell you the truth, though 
he may have walked the distance every day of his 
life, and if he does not know it in terms of miles, 
has a very good idea of how long it will take you 
to reach it, and could tell you if he pleased. But 
no, he tries to find out how far you wish it to be, 
and that distance it is. Ask about the weather, 



298 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

and if you show you wish for rain your peasant 
predicts rain, even as he is sure it is going to be 
fine if you want fine weather. Still at heart he 
is a slave, dependent in a measure on the kindliness 
of those above him for all he wants. 

But dishonesty is not inborn in the Jamaican 
peasant. At the Myrtle Bank Hotel, where the 
servants are not only well paid but get good tips 
from the guests, the maids are so rigidly honest 
that the very pins and hairpins I dropped on the 
floor were picked up and placed on my dressing-table. 

It was a significant fact. They were no longer 
slaves, they were self-respecting men and women — 
even as you or I. Their very tongue had altered. 
They spoke excellent English, spoke in soft and 
pleasant voices, to which it was a pleasure to listen. 
Most of the negroes have naturally pleasant tones, 
educated, they are delightful so long as the speaker 
does not think about himself and become pompous 
and bombastic. 

They tell me there is no discontent among the 
well-paid employees of the United Fruit Company, 
that they do their work cheerfully and well, and 
I have seen for myself happy, honest, well-spoken 
house servants. I once stayed in a house, that of 
the Hon. A. Harrison, custos of Manchester. I 
was, unluckily, very ill, and was waited upon by 
a girl named Hilda, who spoke exactly like a 
highly- educated English lady. She had a charmingly 
modulated voice, and her words were well chosen, 
though she was a simple, barefooted girl in a cotton 
gown with a handkerchief on her head. 

" How is it, Hilda, you speak so nicely ? " I asked 
in wonder. 

She showed a row of even milk-white teeth in 
a smile. 



"HOW MANY FOOT PUSS HAB GOT? 11 299 

"I don't know, ma'am," she said. "Perhaps it 
is because I have lived with my mistress for thirteen 
years and learned to talk as she does." 

This is what may be, but as a rule is not. 

They tell a story of an inspector at a school 
examining the children in general knowledge. 

" How many feet has a cat 1 " he asked smiling. 

A row of black eyes looked at him stolidly. 

He asked again, but still there was no dawning 
intelligence in those eyes. He began to wonder. 
Didn't they have cats in this place? Then the 
teacher stood up. 

" How many foot puss hab got ? " 

And they answered as one. 

I could wish that the schools were better equipped, 
for the negro patois, amusing as it is, is still but patois, 
and though negro voices can be soft and pleasant, 
often I have heard them talking among themselves 
with very ugly intonations indeed. 

And yet it is a shame to complain, for though 
it is delightful to live amidst lovely scenery, it is 
always the people who add piquancy to life. And the 
Jamaican peasant was always adding to my joy. 
He didn't mean to do it. It was when he was most 
natural I got the best results. 

On Kempshot Pen one day the head man came 
reporting that the men had — like men all over the 
world — struck for higher wages. But they chose 
the wrong time. Their mistress could do without 
them, and she did. 

"Tell them," she said, "they can go. I can 
manage." And they set out to enjoy themselves. 
About an hour later she was aroused by a loud 
wailing, and in burst a man with his eyes starting out 
of his head and the lower part of his face a bloody 
pulp. She did not recognise one of her own men, and 



300 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

he could only gug — gug — gug, and splutter blood and 
broken teeth. But there were two shamefaced men 
at the gate who looked as if they had broken all the 
commandments, and expected to be well beaten for it. 

"It was Victor," they explained. 

"Victor!" 

Then they told the story. As they were on 
strike Victor had decided to go shooting. But his 
gun, an old muzzle-loading affair, declined to go 
off. He proceeded to investigate and blew down 
the barrel, while another man kindly applied a fire 
stick to the touch-hole. The matter was settled 
in half a second, and he received most of a charge 
of small shot in the lower part of his face. It looked 
horrible enough, but it wasn't as bad as it might 
have been, for either the powder was damp or he 
had been economical with it. But his wounds were 
far beyond all simple household skill, and his mistress 
could only pack him off on a donkey to the doctor 
in the town below. 

An open-air life and a vegetable diet is apparently 
good for the healing of gun-shot wounds, for long 
before we expected him, Victor was back again, but 
slightly scarred and smiling. He was quite well, he 
explained, and had only lost "a toof or two." The 
doctor said he had taken away half his upper jaw, 
but as he didn't know he had an upper jaw that 
didn't trouble him. 

Meanwhile at the time of the accident the head 
man had improved the occasion. 

" See what happen to Victor when you no work," 
said he, and every man jack came back to work 
without a word about the extra money they had 
felt they could not do without, and worked so well 
that the surprised pen owner found she had three 
days' work done in one. 



SUPERSTITION 301 

It seemed to me extraordinary, but she only 
laughed. She was accustomed to their superstitions 
working that way. Once she had contracted with a 
man named Maxwell to come and shoe her horses, to 
come always the moment he was sent for. He 
agreed readily enough, but the day a horse cast a 
shoe and she sent for him, he sent back word he 
was cutting bush and could not come. Well, she 
could not wait, so sent for another man, and just 
as he was finishing the job, into the yard came 
Maxwell with a bandage over his eye. 

"Why, Maxwell, I thought you couldn't come." 

"I come now, missus." 

" But what's the matter with your eye % " 

"Well, missus, a bit of bush, he jump up an' lick 
me in de eye." 

That bit of bush had licked him to such a tune 
that all the lower eyelid had been torn away, and the 
dismayed girl could only apply boracic ointment as 
something harmless, and recommend his going down 
to a doctor at once. But before he went he assured 
her solemnly that she had only to send for him for 
the future, and on that instant he would come up, and 
up till now he has kept his word. He is afraid some 
evil thing will happen to him if he does not shoe 
the Kempshot horses the moment they require his 
services. 

All over the country are dotted little churches, 
mostly Baptist, but true it is as Huxley — was it not 
— once said, " Man makes God in his own image." 

The damsel, the new housemaid making my bed 
on the verandah, feelingly remarked upon how cold 
I must be. It is pleasantly cool towards morning, 
that is the most that can be said for it, but the real 
truth came out when Sam was brought outside to 
share in the delights of the starlit night. 



302 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

" Poor little baby," sighed Leonie, " Oh, poor 
little baby. Missus not taking him outside ? " 

"Why not?" 

"Oh, missus," in shocked tones> "bad for baby." 

"But why?" 

Long hesitation — and then out it came. " He 
small. Dey can kill him easy." 

It was very startling. " Who will kill him ? " 

Much wriggling. She evidently didn't like to 
mention it, but she felt the case was desperate. 

" Dem tings dat walk about at night." 

"What things?" 

We'd seen nothing larger than a mongoose. They 
may go about at night for all I know, they certainly 
tore about the grass in the daytime, but I really 
did not think by the hurried manner in which 
they declined our acquaintance they'd come very 
near. 

She paused, wriggled again, rubbed first one foot 
against a neat brown leg and then the other, put 
her fingers half way down her throat and whispered 
as she rolled her eyes — 

" De duppies." 

No ! One couldn't smile, she was so desperately 
in earnest, so really concerned for the sake of the 
little helpless baby. We older women might chance 
things, but she evidently felt it was playing it low 
down on the baby to expose him to such risks. 

" Oh, duppies ! There aren't any duppies." 

" Yes, missus," and her eyes turned towards where, 
on the shores of the Caribbean, the Montego Bay 
dead lie resting, sleeping their long last sleep amidst 
coco-palms and gorgeous flamboyant trees. Oh, a 
lovely graveyard, and the sea breeze sweeps across 
it in the daytime, and by night comes whispering the 
scented wind from the hills. " Dey catch yous " — she 



DUPPIES 303 

grew excited and slurred her words — " tear yous to 
pieces." 

We are naturally brave. " Oh, Buffer will settle 
them." Buffer being the nearest approach to a 
bull terrier we could get in Jamaica, a powerful 
and handsome white dog. 

Again she shook her head mournfully. "Dey 
tear him to pieces." 

But in spite of all we slept outside and she shook 
her head mournfully, " Poor little baby ! " 

When the duppies did not take us the servants 
only considered for some reason or other the evil 
day was postponed. No one liked passing that 
graveyard a quarter of a mile away at night. 

Indeed, this faith in evil spirits seems pretty 
general, even among people who are a shade higher 
in the social scale than a house servant. 

When we were at the Hyde and Sam was very 
tiny, we used to put him in his cradle on the 
porch outside the front door, and leave him there 
to sleep in the fresh air. 

To me one day came the " Busha " of the estate, 
a brown man, who naturally held a position of 
authority. 

"Mrs Gaunt," he said uneasily, "the baby is 
alone." 

"He's asleep." 

"Yes, I see he's asleep. But Mrs Gaunt — we 
never leave a baby alone." Then he hesitated quite 
a long time and added, "it's dangerous." 

I thought of what could possibly harm a sleeping 
baby. We were close against the mountains. Eagles ? 
But there weren't any eagles, and I didn't expect they 
would swoop down at the house front if there were. 
Turkey buzzards? Yes, there were "John Crows." I'd 
even seen the birds of carrion on the verandah rails. 



304 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

"Oh, the c John Crows.' I never thought they'd 
hurt him." 

" They won't. They won't touch anything alive. 
But, Mrs Gaunt," he sank his voice and spoke very 
slowly and impressively, "we never leave a baby 
alone. We believe that the spirits come and play 
with them and it's bad." 

He was evidently afraid that as a white woman 
I would laugh at this, and he had only spoken out 
of the kindness of his heart, because the baby was 
in danger. But, of course, I did not laugh. Why 
should I laugh at faiths other than mine ? And 
so encouraged, he told me of the spirits he had 
seen in broad daylight, spirits that clothed them- 
selves as his friends, and only when he came up 
close did he perceive they were, as he put it, evil 
spirits. 

Well, as a matter of fact, when he was not 
likely to be about we let Sam sleep on the porch, 
and outside he continued to sleep at night in 
spite of Leonie's protest, and so far as I can see 
neither duppy nor evil spirit ever did him the 
least harm, dear little man. In fact he continued 
to improve till he was the fine baby of the district, 
and I set it down to the fresh air in which he 
lived day and night. I am afraid I wickedly used 
the faith in duppies to my own advantage. Buffer 
hated a black man. At Montego Bay he used to 
sit outside the gate and kindly allow people to 
pass on the other side of the road, but if they 
came too near the territory he was guarding, he 
stepped out and held them up. If we heard a 
squeal we knew it was a woman, if a howl, a man, 
and flew to the rescue, but if they threw stones at 
him it almost took a motor car to shift him. He 
had a great reputation, and there was no predial 



A DUPPY RAISER 305 

larceny round my house, chickens and eggs were 
quite safe. But the people were afraid of him, and 
when I went for a walk with Buffer peacefully 
trotting along by my side, for he wouldn't have 
dreamt of touching anybody away from his own 
ground, I was more than once met by a line of 
furious women with sticks uplifted. 

" Kill ! kill ! " they shouted, and I thought of the 
old days when they would have killed a white 
woman if they could and not only her dog. It was 
really awe inspiring. I was afraid they would fling 
their sticks at Buffer, and then somebody would 
be hurt. And the men too threatened, "We kill 
dat dog ! " 

I thought they would do it too, do it in some 
cruel and lingering fashion, so I threatened in my 
turn. " If you touch that dog and hurt him so that 
he has to die, I warn you his duppy will haunt you, 
and I tell you the duppy of a big white dog is a 
much worse thing than the dog himself, for you will 
not be able to get rid of that ! " 

And I heard afterwards they said, "Missus go 
put him duppy on we." And I had a reputation 
as a duppy raiser, and Buffer survived till I could 
get him away to Kempshot Pen, where he had 
more range, and where his fighting qualities are 
much valued by his new mistress. 

Still is the faith in Obeah strong in Jamaica. 
It is the ju-ju of the Coast, and all the historians 
have many tales to tell of its dread powers. 

In the year 1780, the parish of Westmoreland 
was kept in a constant state of alarm by a run- 
away negro called Plato, who had established him 
self among the mountains and collected a troop 
of banditti, of which he was the chief. He robbed 
very often and murdered occasionally. This could 



306 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

not be allowed, and at last Plato was taken and 
condemned to death. He told the magistrates who 
condemned him that his death would be revenged 
by a storm which would lay waste the whole island 
that year, and when his negro jailer was binding 
him to the stake — he was evidently burned to death 
according to the ruthless custom of the time — he 
told him he should not live long to triumph in his 
death, for that he had taken good care to Obeah 
him before quitting prison. 

It certainly did happen, strangely enough, says 
Matthew Lewis, that before the year was over there 
was the most violent storm ever known in Jamaica, 
and as for that jailer, "his imagination was so 
forcibly struck by the threats of the dying man, 
that although every care was taken of him, the 
power of medicine exhausted, and even a voyage 
to America undertaken in hopes that a change of 
scene might change the course of his ideas, still 
from the moment of Plato's death he gradually 
pined and withered away before the completion of 
the twelvemonth." 

Now that was written of 1780, but the very 
morning I wrote it, 7th March 1921 on Kempshot 
Pen, came a stalwart negro to see Miss Maxwell 
Hall, and to discuss local politics with her. 

"And how is it," asked the young lady, "Daniel 
Cooper is such a bad man now ? He won't work 
and he thieves." 

"Missus," said the cultivator solemnly, "we 
sorry for him. Can't blame Daniel Cooper. Him 
can't help it. Him put so. When I go to Cuba 
him good boy " — the gentleman was over forty even 
then — "an' when I come back dat Charles Henry 
put him so. Dat bad man Charles Henry. Make 
him tief, make him lie, put him so." 



" PUT SO " 307 

So Daniel Cooper, idle scamp, for some unknown 
reason is to be pitied not blamed, because it is a well- 
known fact that Charles Henry is an Obeah man. 

Obeah is a very real and live thing in the 
mountains round Montego Bay. But Miss Maxwell 
Hall has decreed that the gentleman who has 
been " put so," whether he is to be pitied or blamed, 
shall not come on her land. She will not encourage 
Obeah. 

There was another case, a well-known case some 
years ago. A woman with two sons got leave to 
take up land on Kempshot. She put the boys to 
clear it, and as they worked a man came and said 
she could not have it. Her husband, who was dead, 
owed him twenty pounds, and he was taking the 
land instead. Everyone knew it was a lie, he never 
had twenty pounds to lend anybody. But as the 
boys worked he warned them. 

"You come back after dinner, see what happen 
to you." 

But they laughed and came back. 

"You no come to-morrow," threatened the man, 
and sure enough next day both boys were ill, and 
while one died the other has been an idiot ever since. 

Again, some years ago, a maid-servant refused the 
advances of a man she disliked. He threatened her. 

"You no come to me I put you so." 

But she laughed and tossed her head. And 
that night she was taken with terrible pains that 
threatened to crush the life out of her. The doctor 
was sent for, an English physician. He said he 
thought the girl had been poisoned, but the case 
baffled him. No remedy that he could think of had 
any effect, and he thought she must die. 

Then came the cook to her master, her mistress 
happened to be away. 



308 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

"Massa," said she, "Missus very fond of 
Gloriana." 

He acquiesced. The girl was a favourite with 
his wife. 

"Massa," pleaded the cook, "you send for 

Dr ," naming a mulatto doctor, a Creole, who 

had taken his degree in America, "he can cure 
Gloriana." 

Her master looked dubious. If the man with 
a good Edinburgh degree could do nothing, he had 
small faith in any other man. But the cook was 

determined. "Dr can cure." Therefore Dr 

was sent for. Sure enough, the new man looked 
at the girl, heard the story, went round the garden, 
gathered a leaf here and a leaf there, made a decoc- 
tion which the girl drank, and presently she was 
well again. The Creole had lived in the island, and 
had grown up in the ways of the negroes. 

But Obeah so used is certainly a very terrible 
thing, and not to be made light of or trifled with. 

For the man of African descent, light-hearted ; 
and happy soul as he is, has another side to his 
character which must not be overlooked, and which 
has its influence on his life. Ever and again it ! 
peeps out. 

One day Miss Maxwell Hall, riding among the 
hills, came upon, as she had done hundreds of times 
before, a pleasant little river which full to the brim, j 
for the rains had been heavy, wandered along between 
plantations of sugar-cane. Presently she came to j 
a gate, and as it had never occurred to her to do 
before, she opened it and rode in. The river R 
widened, the hills closed in, and the trees grew jj 
denser, and she found herself riding along a dank, jj 
dark path overhung with rose-apple trees and i; 
mangoes, and as these trees do when it is very | 



BAPTISM HOLE 309 

damp, all the leaves were turning black and covered 
with mildew, the river ended in a dark pool under- 
neath, a pool of deep, black water that poured itself 
away underground. The ground was sodden and 
wet, and reeking of decay. The air was heavy and 
contaminated, and the black leaves of the rose- 
apple trees shut out the light and were themselves 
apparently lifeless, or perhaps rather they were 
reeking with a sinister, evil life. Had she found 
a pool where witches met, or where the Obeah men 
wove their ghastly spells ? Her very horse's hoof- 
beats were muffled in the foul and rotten vegetation 
underfoot. 

She made her way back into the brilliant tropical 
sunshine, which was but a little way off. Leaning 
against the gate was a man idly chewing a bit of 
sugar-cane. 

" What place is that ? " she asked. 

He looked up at her. 

"It belongs to de church," he said. 

"Belongs to the church ! " she said. " Then, why 
on earth don't they clear away some of those mouldy 
old apple trees ? " 

"Huh!" said he, "dey likes it dat way. It 
be Baptism Hole ! " 

And so it was, the place used for one of the 
most important ceremonies of the Baptist church ! 

They fear still these people, I am afraid, some 
of them some unknown terrible power. 

At Kempshot Pen there is an observatory built 
by the late Mr Maxwell Hall, who installed there 
a telescope, because he was an astronomer. Always 
his daughter used to help her father in his lifetime, 
and on one occasion there came to her no less a 
person than the schoolmaster from the nearest 
village, seeking information about the stars. She 

x 



310 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

gave him a couple of elementary books, and 
suggested that he should come up some evening 
and look through the telescope. He came, a black 
man, immaculately clad in a neat tweed suit, a 
high starched collar, a silken tie and — a machete 
was concealed under his arm up his coat. 

His hostess was very much astonished, but she 
said nothing, only suggested he should look at the 
full moon through the telescope. He assented, 
spent an instructive evening, and then over rum » 
and water and cake opened his heart. 

There were two opinions in the village, he said, ; 
and he himself had not known which to believe. 
One was that the squire opened the roof, and putting 
up the long tube drew down the stars and examined 
them, the other that he went up through the tube 
to the stars and moon ! Now he knew. 

But, mark you, what a step upward it means 
that this man should come to enquire, even with 
a machete under his arm. 

They say that the last census gave half the people 
of marriageable age in Jamaica as married, but had 
I not been told that, I should have thought with 
Lady Nugent that the Jamaican woman did not \\ 
think much of matrimony. What she does want 
is a child, and a child she very often has, no matter 
what teachers and preachers may say to the contrary. 
Sometimes a couple, when they have got over the 
flush and restlessness of youth, will live together 
peaceably and happily, either married or unmarried, 
but the average Jamaican peasant girl — I do not 
say all, but many certainly' — will often have a child 
before she settles down. As in Africa, it is 
motherhood that counts first. 

I discussed the matter with Christy, who presided I 
over the forlorn stone-paved cavern called a kitchen f 



"HIM'S FADER WHITE COLONEL" 311 

when I first arrived in Jamaica. Christy was a 
wild-looking lady with her hair on end, bare feet 
of course, and a ragged skirt. She had been comely 
in her own way, but she was as dirty as she was 
unkempt, and decidedly as useless. She had, how- 
ever, great dramatic powers and could tell a story. 
She had three children and she displayed them 
with pride. 

No husband was in evidence, so I concluded 
rashly she was a widow. 

" Oh no, missus. My husban' he get intelligence 
an' he lefFme." 

I didn't wonder at his leaving her. I was only 
surprised that he did not "get intelligence" before 
she had three children. 

"I got 'nother chile," said she, as if fearing these 
three did not do her justice, "a white chile." 

I wasn't accustomed to Jamaican ways then and 
I was startled. The three before me could hardly 
have been blacker. 

"Him's fader white colonel," said she proudly, 
and she mentioned a well-known name in the island, 
" him's fader very good to me. Have him before 
I get married." 

I suppose I looked a little surprised. 

" Not do that in England ? " asked Christy, seek- 
ing information, and I mendaciously assured her that 
every woman in that favoured land waited till she 
went to church and wore a ring before she had a 
child. 

I was introduced to the white son later on, a 
great hulking mulatto with rather a sullen air, and 
I noticed that the son born out of wedlock was 
treated with great respect by the sister and brothers 
who in England would be counted the more fortunate. 
They all called him "massa." But he was good 



312 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

to his wild-looking mother, and brought her and 
her family many presents. I was not surprised that 
she was very proud of the colonel's son. 

Then came Rebekah, who took her place when 
we could stand Christy and her brood no longer. 

Rebekah had a child, and was openly proud of 
him. We always discussed him when she kneaded 
the bread, and I stood over her to see that she did 
it, because if I had not, she would have considered 
that kneading as done. 

"Missus looking lovely," said Rebekah, " in her 
pink dress." Missus' dress wasn't pink and she 
didn't look lovely, but I suppose Rebekah considered 
it a good way to open the morning. Perhaps if I 
felt she considered me lovely, I might ease up on 
the bread kneading. I never did, but she never 
failed to try. Then she told me about her "chile." 

"Yes, missus, de fuss' chile I get he die." 

" Ah, that was sad. And what was his name ? " 

" Him name Lily. Den I pra,y to the Lard an' 
He give me anoder." 

" And your husband—" I began. 

" Oh, missus, I get no husban'. He's fader, 
Amos Hussy, very good man he's fader, help me 
with de chile." 

"A white man? " I asked, remembering Christy's 
colonel. 

"Oh, missus!" — she stopped kneading — "if he 
white I be rich woman. He a cultivator. Very 
good man." 

But Frances the laundry woman was franker 
still. She brought with her her son " Hedgar," aged 
eight, and she explained — 

"Hedgar's fader very proud of him, tink most 
of Hedgar, more'n all his sons. He want me to 
leave him an' he keep him, but I say ' no.' Hedgar de 



NICE FEELING 313 

on'y chile I get, mus' keep him, an' I get no work 
in dat country," 

That far country was about twelve miles off. 

But the other sons were a little mystifying ; how- 
ever, she kindly explained, being a talkative soul. 

"He get four sons by four women, all about de 
same age, but he tink most of Hedgar." 

I really felt a little delicacy about pursuing 
enquiries any further, but Frances felt none. It was 
commonplace to her. 

"He get married," she chortled, "an' his wife 
give him no chilluns ! " 

Frances let me in for sanctioning immorality 
with a vengeance. She had a room in which she 
and Edgar slept, and she kept herself while I paid 
her the magnificent sum of 7s. a week. Too little, I 
admit. But what was I to do ? It was higher than 
the wages around, and she certainly wasn't worth 
what she got. Still she apparently felt no lack, 
for when I saw a strange girl about the place, 
I was informed it was Frances' cousin come to stay 
with her in the country for a change ! And when 
the cousin was gone, seeing I said nothing, she came 
to me and told me that the man she was going 
to marry wanted to come and see her. 

"An' he say, missus, he want to come like a man 
an' not hidin'. Say, 'ask missus, let him come." 

I was struck with the nice feeling on the man's 
part, and cordially gave my permission, though I 
must say I was surprised at its being asked. 

He came one night after I had gone to bed and 
next morning he was engaged in chopping wood for 
the cook. And then I found to my dismay that he 
and Frances and Edgar shared her room ! 

What was I to say? My leave had been asked. 
So I shut my eyes and said nothing, and the gentle- 



314 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

man stayed a fortnight, and then sent in to know 
what present I was going to give him before he went 
away ! 

I suppose to the average stay-at-home middle- 
class English woman this state of things sounds 
shockingly immoral, but after all is it Dot that things 
are here done openly that in other places are done 
under the rose. 

Up and down Jamaica have I been, and I can 
honestly say that the average Jamaican peasant 
woman looks happy. Nay, she looks more than 
happy, for happiness may be a passing condition, 
the majority of the Jamaican peasant women look 
entirely content. There is no unspoken longing in 
a peasant woman's face, she is quite satisfied. 

"Missus," said Leonie persuasively, "me kindly 
begging you leff me sleep home." Now Leonie had 
sworn by all her gods that she would stay at her 
post all night, so enquiries were made and it was 
found " me cousin " was going to have a baby in six 
weeks, and as it was her first, very naturally she did 
not like being alone at night. But what about her 
husband? Oh, she hadn't a husband. Whatever 
made missus think that ? The father ? " Oh, he 
nice young man, he helping her a lot, but he too 
young, not worth marrying." 

" Missus, kindly begging — " insinuatingly. 

Well, of course, Leonie spent her nights with 
the expectant young mother, and everybody was 
satisfied. 

The real trouble is that these poor little children 
thus brought into the world are often not properly 
looked after. How can a young woman keep herself 
and her child on 7s. a week, and that is more than the 
majority of them get? And so often it ends in a 
pitiful little white coffin with a forlorn little wreath 



"WHO, AMONGST US, WOULD DO AS MUCH V 315 

of fern upon it, carried on a man's shoulder to the 
graveyard. I have seen them often. There are no 
followers, though the Jamaican loves a funeral. 

"Not worth while," said Malvina when I asked 
why no one went to the poor little baby's funeral. 

Not that the women do not help each other. 
The fat, smiling cook at Kempshot who could make 
most excellent omelettes, had not only her own child 
to keep, but two of her dead sister's. She was not 
married, neither had the sister been. But will any 
of the virtuous venture to cast a stone ! Who 
amongst us who pride ourselves upon our decent 
lives would do as much. But again the difficulty 
crops up. Those children will grow more and more 
expensive. How can she start them in the world ? 

Sometimes these children are "lent out." It is 
a curious custom in the country, the survival of the 
old slave days when there were numerous stable 
helpers and servants in the Great House, and a 
child was sent by his mother there and became the 
understudy of an understudy, and so learned about 
horses or gardening or housework. Now, of course, 
there are no white people whose houses are open 
in such fashion, but it is no uncommon thing for a 
child to be "lent out" by its mother to some small 
cultivator, either to do housework or to work in the 
fields for his or her food or clothes. The food is 
plain and, often like the clothes I am afraid, scanty. 

Miss Maxwell Hall was called out one morning 
to interview a miserable-looking little boy, about as 
high as the table, who in a ragged shirt and pants 
stood in the chill of early morning at her gate, 
holding a still more miserable-looking little white 
dog on a string. 

He had come to see missus, he said ; he had 
waited all night to see her, waited in the cold and 



316 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

wet, poor child, for it is cold in the hills to these 

people. His mammy had lent him out to Mr 

"over on the hill yander," and someone had given 
him the puppy, which he loved dearly. And every 
bone in that poor little dog was plainly visible, 
his master did not give the little boy much, but he 
provided nothing at all for the dog. So last night 

Mr had set his dinner down and gone out for 

a moment, and while he was away the little starving 
dog had wolfed the lot and then wisely run away 
and hidden in the bush. Upon the small owner fell 
the dinner-less man's wrath and he beat him, beat 
him with a board with nails in it, and he displayed 
to the horrified girl the marks of that castigation. 
Then he had fled away, recovered his dog and come 
to her for protection. Poor little " lent out " child ! 

But all masters and mistresses are not so cruel. 
Many are kindly enough and share what they have 
with their dependents. The trouble is that they 
are ignorant, they do not know how to make the 
most of the opportunities that are theirs. 

When I lived at the Hyde among the hills in 
Trelawny, the people used to come down to the 
Great House to see us and sell us eggs and fruit — 
often I am afraid our own eggs and our own fruit — 
and they used to beg a little. Retinella, whom I 
knew had fowls, and who was I think honest, used 
to bring a dozen eggs for sale, and then produce a 
very tiny bottle. 

"Missus, I kindly begging you a little scent, 
going to a wedding" — or a funeral. Both these 
entertainments required perfuming, and there were 
more of them I am sure than the population could 
possibly stand. 

But they did not always beg and they did not 
always sell. Sometimes they would bring a few 



"TO MARRY." " BRIDE WANTED " 317 

heads of corn, a yam or a sour sop, and when 
payment was offered it would be, " Missus, I kindly 
giving it you. You give me things, you never let 
me give you things." So then we would accept 
gratefully, and cast about to see what return could 
be made without it being too patent that we were 
giving something for value received. 

The town man likes to see himself in print, and 
not only the letters in the Gleaner, the principal 
Jamaican paper, but the advertisements show his 
sentiments. 

I think the first thing that struck me was the 
many advertisements for straightening the hair. 
I am accustomed in these northern latitudes to 
see many prescriptions offering a permanent wave 
that no damp will affect, and I have seen not only 
women but young men with their hair carefully 
" Marcelled " with the curling tongs, so why I should 
be amused at the man who wants the kink taken 
out of his locks I do not know. There are certainly 
many men and women who do desire it. 

But where the coloured man really spreads him- 
self out is in the matrimonial advertisements. They 
are a constant source of delight. 

Sometimes a lady wants to be married. Here is 
one who is beginning early — 

"To Marry," the advertisement is headed. "A 
lady eighteen years of age wants a husband " (no 
beating about the bush, plain statement of fact) ; 
" must be from a respectable family. Fair or white 
preferred. Enclose photograph ; please send name 
and address. — Apply Miss G., c/o Gleaner, Kingston." 

"Bride Wanted," says another advertisement; 
but the gentleman who wants has an eye to the 
main chance. "To correspond with a lady of some 



318 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

independent means with the view of marriage ; any 
colour except white, must be good at sewing ; 
March born preferred. — Apply 'Businessman,' 
Williamsfield P.O." 

"Any colour except white" is, of course, sheer 
defiance. 

But it is the advertisements of those who rather 
wish the knot had never been tied that are the 
most amusing. 

" Notice. — My wife, Sophia Junor, having left my 
home from the 31st day of May in my sick bed, 
and up to this date having not returned, this is 
to warn the public that I do not hold myself re- 
sponsible for any debt she might contract. Matthias 
Junor, Bath P.O., Knockands." 

Very often the complaining man warns the public 
that he intends to marry again, as " I cannot manage 
myself." Sometimes he puts it in much more 
grandiloquent language. 

"My wife, Mrs Henrietta Scott, has not been 
under my protection for the last twenty-one years, 
1899 to 1920, and I am not aware of her existence 
outside of Jamaica. Unless I am put in possession 
of information as to whether she is living or not, 
I shall proceed to enter into contract of matrimony. 
Joseph Scott, Windward Road, Kingston, 12th 
July 1920." 

On other occasions the lady has something to say 
on the subject. 

"Notice. — I, Edith Phinn, hereby beg to notify 
the public that my chief cause to leave my husband 
was this : He has ill-treated me and threatened to 
shoot me with his revolver, and I am now residing 



MATRIMONIAL 319 

at my families residence, 50 Cumberland Road, 
Spanish Town." 

I do like "my families residence." 
And yet another indignant lady — 

"Notice. — I beg to inform the public that I have 
not left the care and protection of my husband as 
stated by him" (I do regret that I missed his 
advertisement), "and furthermore all his real and 
personal belongings are for myself and his four 
children. We are living in his home, I never left 
it even for a day. So I therefore warn the public 
not to transact any business with him without 
my consent.— (Mrs) M. E. Sibblies, Lewis Store, 
Clonmel, P.O." 

A lady who can take care of herself ! 

I suppose nobody quite realises what it is that 
appeals to a man in the woman he takes. Presum- 
ably there is usually some strong attraction, and 
yet there is a story told in Jamaica, a perfectly 
true story I believe, which makes me feel that some 
people are either easily satisfied or exceedingly 
accommodating. 

There were brides and grooms and bridesmaids 
and ushers, and much excitement and confusion and 
giggling, but the parson went on gravely with the 
ceremony, trusting by his correct demeanour to bring 
these dark children of the church to a realisation 
of the solemnity of the sacrament in which they 
were taking part. But they would not calm down. 

"I think — " he began severely, when the last words 
had been spoken, but an usher, who had been par- 
ticularly objectionable, interrupted him, and he gave 
him the attention now he had denied him during the 
service. 



320 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

"But sah, but minister," stammered the excited 
gentleman in a high collar, "you's married de wrong 
woman on to de wrong man ! " 

Now I, being a common-sense heathen, should 
have been tempted to say, like the clergyman 
officiating at Easter-time marriages in the Potteries, 
when ten or twelve couples are married at once, 
"Now, sort yourselves." It seems to me it is the 
intention that counts. But our clergyman was made 
of different stuff. He firmly believed he had bound 
indissolubly men and women who did not desire 
each other, and in much consternation he retired 
to his study and sat there with his head in his 
hands, wondering what on earth he should do. 

Meanwhile, the wedding party also discussed 
the matter. And presently the much-troubled parson 
heard a tap at his door. 

"Come in," he said gloomily, and in came the 
wedding parties, all wreathed in smiles. 

"Well, minister," said the spokesman amiably, 
"we's been tarkin' an' tarkin' an' we's 'greed to 
mak' ta change ! " 

And the parson was mightily relieved. He did 
not understand how lightly matrimony sits upon 
the negro. 

But that surely was nothing to the predicament 
of the lady who took her baby to be christened, 
and announced at the font in answer to the question, 
" How do you name this child ? " 

"Call de chile Beel-ze-bub." 

" Oh, but that's not a proper name for a child," 
cried the horrified minister. 

The proud mother looked at him doubtfully. 

"But I get him outer de Bible." 

"But I tell you it's a wicked name," asseverated 
the minister. 



DREADFUL SCANDAL OF BEELZEBUB 321 

She sighed. All the trouble to be gone through 
again. 

"Den, minister, what I call him ? " 

" Well, call him John if you want a Bible name. 
That's in the Bible." 

Still the woman felt vaguely there was something 



wrong. 



"You sure dat good name for him, minister" 
— very earnestly. 

"Oh yes, quite sure," said the minister, anxious 
to put as far behind them as possible the dreadful 
scandal of Beelzebub. 

So John the baby was christened, and the mother 
carried it outside and the minister oame out and 
did the benevolent pastor to her and her friends. 

"De chile's name am John," announced the 
mother. 

" Hoo ! John ! " snorted a neighbour with more 
knowledge, "but amn't de piccaninny a gal?" 
And sure enough she was. 

Leonie, being sent on a message, returned 
nonchalantly and empty-handed. 

" But, Leonie, where's the parcel ? " Leonie 
smiled non-committally. 

"But, surely, if they didn't give you a parcel 
they gave you a letter ? " 

"Oh yes, missus," agreed Leonie readily, "dey 
give me a paper but he lose he's self on de way up." 
And of course there was no more to be said. 

My wrath was as nothing to the wrath of a 
lady who wanted a pergola made exactly like one 
she had already that had been up for three or four 
years and was nicely covered with roses. 

She took the negro carpenter and showed him 
the pergola, measured it under his eyes, gave him the 
measurements and the lumber, and left him to make 



322 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

another on the other side of the house. Then, alas, 
she went away for the day. When she came back, 
to her horror and dismay she found her original 
pergola, all covered with its nicely-tended creepers — 
the work of years — had been taken down, stripped of 
its greenery, laid on the ground, and the thoughtful and 
careful carpenter was engaged in measuring it so as to 
make the new one exactly like it ! What she said I 
don't know, but incidents like this help me to under- 
stand the punishments the slaves received of yore. 

This same woman's husband happened to say 
casually to his carter that he would want him to go 
into Montego Bay, 16 miles away, the next day. 
Next day he found carter and team missing, and 
could only use bad language. They did not return 
till long after dark. 

"Well, boss," said the driver cheerfully, "I been 
to Kerr's, an' I been to Hart's, an' I been to—" 
and he mentioned half a dozen places — "an' I wait 
an' wait, an' I wait, an' I go back an' dey none 
get nothen' for yous." 

"Why, you fool," said his angry master, "you 
ought to have come to me, I had something I wanted 
you to take into town." 

After all, the uneducated negro is not the only 
fool in the world, and though I laugh, I feel very 
kindly towards the sinners. 

But, sometimes, their foolishness harmed them- 
selves, though I am bound to say that was not their 
view of the case. 

One of my neighbours, a very kindly American, 
being told by her boy that he wanted to go off 
early on Christmas Day, thoughtfully asked him if 
he would then rather have the money instead of 
the Christmas dinner. He considered a moment, 
and to her surprise elected to have the dinner. 



"IN DISH PUDDING HAB TWO MASTERS" 323 

On Christmas Day, immediately after the first 
breakfast, which is very early in the tropics — seldom 
after seven, often long before — she went into the 
kitchen to give her orders for the day, and there 
to her great surprise she saw her boy tucking into 
his Christmas dinner which the cook had cooked 
for him. 

"Me eating it now, missus," he explained with 
a grin. 

"But, Howard!" cried the lady, "how can 
you possibly eat your dinner immediately after 
breakfast ? " 

"Wanting a long day," he explained, and the 
explanation seemed to him perfectly natural. 

His mistress knew that boy. There is a negro 
pudding made of grated coconut, coconut milk, corn- 
meal and sugar, baked. Not a bad pudding if a 
little is taken, but Howard one day got outside 
a large pie-dish full, and then came rubbing his 
stomach and groaning to his mistress. 

"Why, Howard," she said a little severely, "I 
should think you did have indigestion. Why didn't 
you put half that pudding away till to-morrow ? " 

" Ah, missus," he said, " when he in dish, pudding 
hab two masters. Now " No, words were un- 
necessary. He'd certainly got that pudding. 

I suppose his case was on a par with that of 
the woman servant in the same place who, usually 
going barefoot, appeared on that same Christmas 
morning of 1920 in a pair of elaborate boots, very 
high-heeled and much too small for her. She could 
hardly totter when she came to wish her master 
and mistress a happy Christmas before setting out 
on her holiday. Her mistress said nothing. She 
had exhausted herself over Howard, but her husband, 
the old doctor, took it upon himself to remonstrate. 



324 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

" Oh, Alice, how can you wear such boots ! " 

" O'ny for to-day, doctor," she said insinuatingly, 
" on'y jus' for to-day ! " A long holiday meant for 
enjoyment, in boots too tight for her, with heels 
raised at least a couple of inches — imagine the 
agony of it. 

But if the ignorant negro is foolish, his foolish- 
ness is as nothing sometimes to that of the white 
man who sets out to help and improve him. 

Britain is not always wise in the Governors she 
chooses, though the Governor in a small community 
is a powerful means to good. There was one well- 
meaning man in an island that shall be nameless, who 
was certainly most desirous to help the black people, 
therefore it occurred to him one day to send a telegram 
to a rich planter of his acquaintance, asking him to 
come and see him as he had something of importance 
to discuss with him. Now, a request from a Governor 
is almost a royal command, but our planter knew 
his Governor. He was busy, and he did not there 
and then dash off and travel the many miles that 
lay between him and Government House. Still, 
since his estate was a long way off, he came at 
some inconvenience to himself. 

And the first greetings over : 

" You have the welfare of your people at heart, 
Mr ? " 

"Surely, sir." 

"I wanted to know — would you be prepared to 
put up a picture show ? " 

" On my place, sir ? " 

" Why, yes, of course, for the benefit of your 
hands." 

" But — but I'm at least five-and- twenty miles 

from the port, and the port is at least six days 
from New York, and " 



DANCES BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON 325 

" Yes, of course, I know that." 

" And where am I to get fresh pictures ? " 

The Governor looked attentive. 

" They would come to the first show," explained 
the planter patiently, "and enjoy it, they would come 
to the second night, the third night they'd grumble, 
and after that they'd laugh at me for a fool." 

"H'ra — ha — h'm. Well, what about dancing 1 
They're fond of dancing ? " 

"Of course." 

" Would you put them up a dancing hall ? " 

"With a floor?" 

"Of course." 

And the planter sighed again for his wasted time, 
for everyone — except this Governor apparently — 
knows that the West Indian negro dances every 
night of his life very happily on the bare earth by 
the light of the stars or the moon ! And I agree 
with the planter such exercise is a great deal more 
wholesome taken in the fresh air as the plantation 
hands are content to take it. 

That planter went home an angry man, and he 
was met by his still more angry head man, who had 
taken his boots to be mended. 

"Massa — massa — " he stammered furiously, "dat 
man — dat tief — boots no mended — he wearing clem. 
Massa — massa, can I have him up for breach of 
promise ? " 

But if anyone is really interested in peasant life 
in Jamaica he should read the books of Herbert 
de Lisser, C.M.G., whose country will some day 
be deeply grateful to him that he has — among other 
things he has done for her — portrayed to the life a 
type that is rapidly passing away. 

Mr Harrison, the Custos of Manchester, tells me 
that the negro is becoming proud. It is the first step 

Y 



326 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

upward. He will not always beg, however great his 
need. He will not if he can help it acknowledge his 
poverty. He told me how upon one of his sugar 
estates he found that for some time the cook he 
had engaged to cook for the working women, who 
were supposed to provide the material for breakfast, 
had nothing to do. The women had no food to be 
cooked. But they never complained, hungry they 
quietly went to work. He therefore instructed his 
"busha" to supply yams or plantains or cocos and 
coconut oil sufficient for a good breakfast for each 
woman. They accepted it gratefully, and they did 
a far better day's work afterwards. This same 
gentleman told me how the little children are like 
their parents, becoming proud and self-respecting. 
They are very poor in that parish where a former 
wasteful generation has denuded the mountains of 
trees to grow coffee, and so interfered with the 
rainfall — but do you think the children are going to 
acknowledge their poverty ? Oh, they have taken 
their dinners to school, and if you doubt it, they 
hold up their little tin pails proudly. Not for worlds 
would they take off the cover and show that inside 
is that most uninteresting of all foods, cold boiled 
yam and not, I am afraid, sometimes enough of that. 

No one will ever taunt such women and children 
with being servile. Never ! 

As I write this, I come across an extract from 
an old writer on the negro slave which is worth 
quoting, the contrast is so great. 

"Negroes," he says, "are crafty, artful, plausible, 
not often grateful for small services, deceitful, over- 
reaching . . . they are avaricious and selfish, giving 
all the plague they can to their white rulers, little 
ashamed of falsehood and even strongly addicted 
to theft." But still even he admits "he has some 



HON. MARCUS GARVEY 327 

good qualities mingled with his unamiable ones. 
He is patient, cheerful and commonly submissive, 
capable at times of grateful attachments where 
uniformly well treated, and kind and affectionate 
towards his kindred and offspring." And he goes on 
to say how tender are the negro mothers. In fact, 
even he had to acknowledge that the great bulk of 
the negroes were beyond the master's observation, 
and we of later date can see for ourselves that the 
faults he complains of are not peculiar to negroes, 
but are the common faults of the slave. 

As yet, however, the man of African race is 
often something of a slavish imitator of things 
European. He struts and boasts of his progress 
exactly as children do. After all, he has had such 
a toilsome way to climb since Britain bestowed upon 
him freedom and poverty, is it to be wondered at 
if occasionally he has gone a little astray. 

A little while ago the Hon. Marcus Garvey 
visited Jamaica, and black Jamaica celebrated his 
arrival by a full page advertisement in the Gleaner 
with a very large picture — a little smeared in the 
printing — of the gentleman in question, the most 
noticeable feature of which was his large expanse of 
white waistcoat. 

"Big Meetings & Concerts" (announced the adver- 
tisement in largest type) ''Arranged All Over 
the Island to Hear Hon. Marcus Garvey. 
Elected Provisional President of Africa, President 
General of the Universal Negro Improvement 
Association and" (oh bathos!) "President of 
the Black Star Line Steamship Corporation. 

" He will be in Jamaica nine days and will 
speak as follows — ■ — " 

And then a list is given of the places at which he 



328 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

will speak, and the subjects on which he will speak, 
and it also announces that as President General of 
his Association he will appear on these nights in his 
robes of office. 

At the bottom of the page it says in large type 
that Marcus Garvey was elected by twenty-five 
thousand delegates to the World Convention of 
Negroes in New York last summer as the First 
Provisional President of Africa. 

This is delicious ! I don't want to laugh at the 
black man, but I think it's a serious clog on his 
upward career to elect Presidents in this casual 
manner. I have seen the only attempt at modern 
civilised government in Africa by the black man, and 
I can only condemn it as a dismal failure, why, then, 
should the men of negro descent take upon them- 
selves to elect for the negroes in Africa a President 
without a with or by your leave. It is really much 
as if the Americans in New York decided to elect a 
President General of Europe or Asia without 
reference to the feelings of the peoples of those 
continents. Of course, it may be merely a term of 
endearment — if so, I have nothing to say against 
it. Everybody to their taste. President of the 
Negro Improvement Association is quite another 
matter. We all wish that society well, so well we 
would not have it weakened by any comic opera 
blandishments, and President of the Black Star 
Line is quite legitimate, even though it is a little — 
well — just a little consequential, for the " Black Star 
Line" is composed as yet of but one steamer, the 
Yarmouth, under 1000 tons. The first time she came 
into Kingston harbour, black Kingston went hysterical 
with delight. That a ship should sail with a black 
captain, and manned by a black crew, seemed to it 
an amazing thing. When the dark man makes a 



' 



"WE ARE CHILDREN AS YET" 329 

fuss over a ship run by his own people, he is 
saying in effect — "We are children as yet, but you 
see we are growing up. We are coming into 
our own." 

It seems to me the negro's great fault is that he 
is bombastic and claims too much. Marcus Garvey 
and his crowd are I suppose the natural reaction 
from the years of ghastly slavery, when a black man 
could not even own himself. Of course we only 
notice those who come strutting ridiculously before 
the footlights. I know there is many and many a 
negro as decent, upright, and self-respecting a man 
as his white confrere, but the trouble is we do not 
notice him beside his more boastful brother. 

That the negro does want his interests looking 
after I have not the slightest doubt. Our servants 
used to come to Eva who was clever with her 
needle to cut out their clothes for them, and it was 
wicked to see the stuff which those poor girls, whose 
pay was only 6s. and 7s. a week, used to buy at 
ridiculously high prices. I have seen Is. 6d. and 
Is. 9d. a yard paid for unbleached calico that could 
not possibly have cost the seller l^d. a yard. And 
it had been bought at a negro shop, they were, in 
fact, imposed upon by men of their race. 

How these things are to be corrected I know 
not. Education I suppose, and education we must 
remember is not the mere teaching of reading and 
writing. I am sorry to say I doubt sometimes if the 
authorities in Jamaica are giving the Jamaican the 
best education that they can. 

"Dear Mrs is so good." That is, good for 

the negroes. They wouldn't even ask her to dinner 
because she is not amusing. They would laugh 
very much at the idea of themselves subscribing 
to her standards of life. 



330 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

No wonder we get inflated gentlemen proclaiming 
themselves " Provisional President of Africa ! " 

For the negro is capable of better things. It 
is a great shame that certain of his numbers should 
make him a laughing-stock. 

When first the idea of contingents of West 
Indian soldiers for the World War was mooted, 
there was opposition. It would be such a bad thing 
for the negro, it would give him an extravagant 
idea of his own value, the country on the return 
of its soldiers might look forward to discontent in 
a certain section, might even fear outrage and rapine. 

But I think the contrary has been the case. 
Exceptions of course there must have been. I should 
not like to set out to count the exceptions among 
the white returned soldiers, but the average Jamaican 
soldier settled down quietly to his work in his own 
country, worked all the better because he had been 
counted a citizen of the Empire, was proud that 
his thews and sinews had helped mightily in the 
great struggle, was glad to be received at last on 
equal terms by men of the colour that so long had 
held him in bondage. 

I hold, and hold very strongly, that the very 
first step in the upraising of either a man or a people 
is the cultivation of proper pride. 

Read this letter I received from a doctor in the 
Cameroons during the war — 

" Certainly the wickedest three hours," he wrote 
concerning a night attack up country, " I ever put in." 
We could not guess the range in the cloudy moon- 
light. The Germans held a hill, we had not a scrap 
of cover, the breast-high grass prevented charging, 
and also made the men stand up to shoot. By 
630 a.m. the Germans cleared out precipitately, 
leaving us in possession of a very good camp. 



TMORU CALFA 331 

"The men were splendid. Tmoru Calfa, a 
sergeant-major, shot through the spine high up, 
lay down by his section and controlled their fire. 
He died next day. His was only one instance 
of their conduct." 

When the Great Koll is called, not among the 
least surely will be found the name of that sergeant, 
pagan from the north of the Gold Coast, who, being 
shot high up in the spine, lay down beside his men, 
controlled their firing and died next day. Not the 
Unknown Warrior buried in Westminster Abbey 
could have done more. 

Which man will the negro race in future years 
think upon more gladly as its representative, Marcus 
Garvey or Tmoru Calfa ? 

The coming of the negro race to the New World 
marks a most extraordinary phase in the world's 
history. They came unwillingly as slaves, and as 
slaves they were held with all the ignominy insepar- 
able from that condition. Of the race in America 
I know nothing save what little I have seen in the 
streets of New Orleans, where they seem as far apart 
from the ruling race as the mountain tops in Jamaica 
are from the river-beds. But in Jamaica, whatever 
there may have been in the old days, there is now 
no such cleft. There is, of course, a difference, 
but it is a difference that is passing, that will pass 
as the years go on and the dark man fits himself 
to take his place in the world as the social equal 
of the white. 

Already he sits in the Legislature. He has 
come a long, long way up from the chained savage 
brought in the slave ships. I hope that if a dark 
man reads this book he will not think unkindly of 
me for writing as if there were a difference between 
black and white. There is, it would be foolish to 



332 JAMAICA AS I SAW IT 

ignore it, but it is only the difference of education 
and training. We must remember that in past ages 
the Anglo-Saxon stood in the market-place in Rome 
chained and in slavery, that blue eyes and flaxen 
hair marked the savage, and dark complexion and 
black eyes the civilised man. The time of servitude 
of the black man is a little closer. He has to come 
up the same stony path that the white man trod, 
and he will do it more easily and more quickly — 
he is doing it — because the white man has prepared 
the way. 

And I say that deliberately, knowing all the 
hardships that the white man has inflicted, for when 
I talk of the time of servitude of the blacks in the 
West Indies, you, my readers, will do me the justice 
to own that I have by no means glossed over the 
crudities and the foolishness and the brutality of men 
of my own colour. But the world is changing, 
changing fast. It is a better place to live in in 
this twentieth century, it will be a better place 
still as the years roll on, and the black man like 
the white will come into his own. 



INDEX 



Accommodating bridal party, 319 
Advertisements, matrimonial, 317 
Annamabu, 84, 85, 90, 96, 101 
Arms and ammunition stored, 155 

" Bad manners," 227 
Baptism by bargain, 239 
Hole, 309 
in high vogue, 241 
Baptist War, 242 
Baptists, said to preach sedition, 

241 
Barrett, Custos at St Ann's, and 
the Colonial Church Union, 
257 
Bayley, Zachary, and the Great 

Rebellion, 156, 160, 161, 166 
" Black Family," 242 
Bleby, Rev. H., a slave martyr, 
247 
punishment of cruel slave 

holders, 250 
slave revolts, 247 
Bondsmen, white, 33 
arrival of negroes enhances value 

of, 54 
clothing and food, 51 
cruelly ill-used, 50 
low status, 52 
premature death, 56 
price of an artizan, 49 
Bridges, Rev. G., attitude of the 
Church of England, 238 
Great Rebellion, 157 
opinion of the negro, 222, 287 
slaves of the Spaniard, 23 
Buried treasure, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 

833 



Colonial Church Union, dissen- 
sion between and Dissenters, 
254 

Colour Question, 76, 225, 263 

Columbus, difficulties faced by, 3, 
6,7,8 

Corsairs, English, French, Dutch, 
Portuguese, 15, 16 

Creole, a beautiful, 78 

Dances, 192, 323 

De Lisser, Herbert, 325 

Duppies, 302 

Edwards, Bryan, brutality of the 
negro, 224 
Great Rebellion, 159-163 
superiority of the Koromantyns, 
128 
Empire, serving the, 287 
Enquirer, an, 280 
Evil spirits, 303 

Fear, 152, 164, 184 

Great Houses, 30 

Hans Sloane, climate, 60 
country life, 58, 59 
diseases, 61 

fertility of Jamaica, 25 
modern healer, 71 
slaves and their punishments, 

66, 67 
Spanish remains, 6 I 
treasure ships, on 



334 



INDEX 



Houses built with a view to de- 
fence, 17 
Hyde, lent by Clarence Lopez, 16 
visitors at, 316 

Inventory of overseer's house, 32 
Isolation of pens and estates, 130 

Jamaica, African customs, 230 

beautiful sea, 7 

distances in, 36 

first pirates in, 10 

marked characteristic of, 282 

mode of carrying in, 96 

unlucky land, 5 
Judgment against the planters, 
223 

Kbmpshot, 168 

cattle pen of Charlotte Maxwell 

Hall, 287, 288, 289 
loveliest view in Jamaica, 289 
milk walk, 289 
Koromantyn Castle, 81 
Koromantyns, rising invariably 
headed by, 81, 160 

Las Casas, Spanish cruelty to 

Indians, 13 
Lent out children, 315 
Lesley, Jamaica in 1700, 42, 154 
clothing of negro slave women, 

146 
planter's daughter, 55 
underfed slaves, 151 
, white bondsmen, 48 
Lewis, Matthew, abolition, 259 
abolition of the whip, 221, 222 
dangerous innovations, 226 
difficulty of getting rid of a bad 

slave, 231 
English labourer and Jamaican 

slave compared, 231 
forbad the Methodists his estate, 

242 
morals of the white man, 131 
mortality among the children, 

147 
Obeah man, 231 



Lewis, Matthew, opinion of the 
country, 220 
slave villages, 132 
unjust overseer, 220 

Madden, Abolition Day, 268 
another side of slavery, 270 
coloured mistresses, 267 
coloured relatives, 264 
eating and drinking, 260 
nature of an oath, 260 
negro minister, 261 
negroes of his day, 262 
value of slaves, 273 
Maroons, ambushes, 198, 205 
appearance of, 181 
brutality of, 178 
cockpit country, 172 
Cudjoe, the leader, 176, 177, 178 
danger to the community, 197 
defences against, 172 
difficulties of troops against, 177 
exiled, 214 
fear of, 175 

firearms easily procured, 179 
first mention, 23 
formidable, 176 
good marksmen, 179 
impregnable defiles, 181 
imprisoning the, 196 
inaccessibility of fastnesses, 177 
luck of, 211 
Malay blood in, 176 
old Maroon Town, 215 
origin of the term, 170 
peoples making up the Maroons, 

176 
Quarrell, Mr, 209 
schooner Mercury, 210 
Spanish hunting dogs, 210 
Spanish slaves, 171 
terms with the, 187, 191, 213 
vanity of planters, 171 
Middle Passage, baby that " took 

sulk," 120 
difficulties of getting the cargo, 

102 
horrors of, 99 
length of time on coast, 107 



INDEX 



335 



Middle Passage, origin of term, 
99 
perquisites of ship's officers, 

126 
sanitary arrangements, 108 
size of ships, 100, 106 
slave ships, Gloria, 111 
Leon, 114 

Little Pearl, 116, 117 
Rodeur, 114 
Zong, 109 
slave ship wrecked on Morant 

Keys, 118 
stowage of a slave ship, 111 
Myrtle Bank, comforts, 5 
negro honesty at, 298 

Negro, easy going ways, 284 
anecdotes of negro peasant life, 

322, 323, 324 
hero, a, 331 
morals, 311-314 
patois, 292 
prolific, 284 
proud women and children, 

226 
wasteful, 260, 292 
Nugent, Lady, Lord Balcarres, 73 
Creole language, 73 
deadly climate, 228, 260 
hard labour in the mills, 225 
her servants, 228 
Jamaican ladies, 72 
morals, 230 

Obeah, 305, 307 

Phillips of the Hannibal, 85 

branding slaves, 92 

buying slaves, 87 

child wives, 87 

life on a slave ship, 94 
Planters of 1720, 40, 41, 42 



Planters of 1720, alliance with 
slaves, 263 
daughter of, 45 

Rebellions, cost of, 157 
at Sutton's, 155 
Great, 157-163 

Seasoning, 150 

Settlers at Port Morant, 37 

Slave Books, Worthy Park and 

Rose Hall, 134-146 
Slave trade very genteel, 1, 109 
Slaves, Creole, 168 

first savages, 123 

food shortage, 129 

heavy penalties for trivial 
offences, 216 

irons, 118 

parts of the island abandoned 
because of runaway, 155 

planters regard as property, 241 

punishment, 151, 153 

rebellions, 126, 150, 159 

shackles, 125 

wandering a danger to the 
community, 152 
Soldiers as colonists, 34 
Spaniards, desperate straits of, 22 

flight, 20 

losing game, 20 

relics of, 27 

Ysassi last Governor, 21 
Spanish towns very small, 14 
Spring Gardens, 238 
Stokes, Luke, 25 

Tales of cruelty, 222, 223 
Treachery of the slavers at Calabar, 
103, 104, 105 

Well-meaning Governor, 3-23 
Worthy Park Returns, 149 



^V 



